On Marie Curie and Me

When people discover I am a nuclear physicist, they often say, “Oh, like Marie Curie!” And yes, I am like Marie in that I have woman parts, I study nuclei, I have two children and a physicist husband. But had I lived in her time, I would not have been that rare female admitted to the Sorbonne. I could not have quietly made the top scores on the math and physics examinations. I am impulsive and thin-skinned, my occasional cleverness passing for deeper talent. I would probably have been a cleaning girl, pregnant at 15, unable to speak any language but my native one, whatever mine might have been back in 1891.

And so I am not that much like Marie Curie, and yet I cannot help myself. I designed a course with her name in the title, one of the perks of being faculty at a small, liberal arts college. I team-teach another course with my historian friend on the history and science behind the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I assign readings about Marie. I lecture on Marie. I think a lot, perhaps too much, about this woman.

Things Marie Curie and I agree on: child rearing, talking to oneself, avoiding medical treatment, and nuclear stability.

She had her father-in-law, a careful man, a loving man, watch her two little doves. When he passed away, she narrowed her eyes and interviewed many a girl until the right one presented herself. Marie knew, as I know, that no mother can do nuclear physics when one ear is listening for her child to stir from an afternoon nap.

Marie talks to herself in Polish, always in Polish, deep in the cave of her thoughts, her papers strewn on the Persian rug, sitting crisscross applesauce or crawling around on those leukemia-plagued knees. On a bad day, I mutter to myself in my office, I swear aloud at the keyboard, the mechanical pencil. On a good day, I whisper to myself as if I am a prodigy.

When I cough my way downstairs on cold mornings, I brush aside pleas from husband and children to seek medical care. I trudge through too many days an illogical martyr, believing willpower exorcises illness. I eventually concede antibiotics. Marie loses the feeling in her thumbs from handling her beloved radium, but she does not stop. She habitually rubs her four fingers against her thumbs at work, at home, in sickness, and in health.

Marie isolated two of the most radioactive elements our planet does keep. My team creates nuclei too unstable for rocky places, volcanoes, sky. My nuclei— oxygen yoked with eight additional neutrons, helium burdened with six neutrons too many—these are naturally the stuff of stars, but with herculean effort we produce them in an oversized Michigan research facility. Our exotic oxygen sheds the excess as fast as the physics allows because the radioactive things of this world, this universe, share one trait, and that is to not be radioactive anymore.

Marie’s radium is lovely, a silvery metal, warm to the touch. Her laboratory in the evening becomes a fairy wonderland, with radium in vials glowing blue in the dying light. She has an affinity for this particular element because she had to shovel hundreds of pounds of dark sooty uranium ore to get even traces of it.

Nuclear radiation makes sense. Radioactive materials like radium, nature made unstable. Over time, the nuclei cast out the parts of themselves that disturb. Uranium 238 eventually becomes lead. Uranium becomes stable, immortal.

Radiation is dosed in “curies.” A curie represents a breathtaking amount of radiation. I imagine crawling into a 660-pound igloo of purified uranium-238 mined from the geologic formations near my Pennsylvania home and living there for five and a half days. To get the same radiation dose from her radium, Marie Curie needs only a radium pellet, the weight of a postage stamp, in her lab coat pocket for an hour. I have never been exposed to such an amount. In this respect, Marie Curie and I are not alike.

She...