Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information by Eva Hemmings Wirtén (review)

Eva Wirtén’s Making Marie Curie is a compact study of several aspects of Marie Curie’s life and career as a public figure rather than a biography of a scientist at work on her science. The book is concerned, in successive chapters (which might well have stood alone as journal articles) with four topics: 1) Curie’s writing of her own life, 2) her and her husband Pierre’s attitudes toward the ownership of their discoveries, especially radium, 3) the scandal surrounding Marie’s affair with Paul Langevin after Pierre’s death, and 4) Marie Curie’s role in the 1920s and 1930s in the League of Nations’ attempt to create an international standard for intellectual property pertaining specifically to scientists as creators of significant novelty (as opposed to the authorial rights of artists and the patent rights of inventors).

Thus, the book uses Marie Curie and her life and fame as an opportunity to discuss current concerns—intellectual property, celebrity culture, and the organization of scientific information—and to retroject these concerns to the beginning of the twentieth century as an “origin story” of tensions evident in our culture now. The first of these is the tension between science as “public knowledge” and science as intellectual property, privately held, in a commercial culture. The second tension is created by the emergence of the scientist as a celebrity figure and cultural icon. This tension has long been known and chronicled in the case of Albert Einstein and has become a substantial part of the story of Einstein’s life. Whether we are to characterize Einstein as the “male Curie” or Curie as the “female Einstein” is immaterial, as these two Nobel scientists have become canonical representations of scientific celebrity, the gendered character of which has undergone considerable scrutiny for the better part of half a century.

Wirtén is quite open about her aim, and says toward the beginning of the book that “we write about the past as an expression of present concerns,” and then goes on to quote Stephen Shapin: “we can write about the past to find out about how it came to be that we live as we do now, and indeed, for giving better descriptions of the way we live now” (3, emphasis in original). This interesting comment falls halfway between an anthropological viewpoint and a kind of Whiggish presentism in which we concentrate deliberately on portions of the past that seem to lead forward into us. I take Wirtén’s comment to indicate that she both understands that we do this and endorses the procedure and its intent.

While I have no argument with the idea that we write about the past as an expression of present concerns, I would suggest that in this regard, we proceed with caution. The anthropologist Mary Douglas went into this dilemma in some detail in her 1986 book How Institutions Think, in which she points out that this sort of historical revisionism “distorts as much after revision as it did before. The aim of revision is to get the distortions to match the mood of the present times” (69). Douglas also argues, “History emerges in an unintended shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch these practices establish selective principles that highlight some kind of events and obscure others is to inspect the social order operating on individual minds” (69–70). Similarly, the sociologist of science Robert Merton has repeatedly argued that, in fact, the history of science exists as a discipline precisely to look at those aspects of scientific practice that scientists are trained not to see. Once we know that our culture creates shadow zones where we are encouraged not to look and brightly lit areas on which we are urged to concentrate, we can use this information to our critical advantage...