Henri Dubois
Excusez-moi, madame. I’ve sold you a copy of Le Temps outside your building most days for years now but I’ve never asked what you do… What is it exactly?
Marie Curie
Dzień dobry, I am glad to be here. I’m a scientist, or more an explorer I would call it. I have two Nobel Prizes, one for physics and one for chemistry.
Henri Dubois
Impressive, tell me more?
Marie Curie
Well, it has been a life’s work. My beautiful partner Pierre and I began working on radioactivity here in Paris in the 1890s. Uranium had just been discovered but it couldn’t account for the level of radioactivity in ore with uranium present. We looked deeper.
Henri Dubois
What did you find?
Marie Curie
Over those years we discovered Uranium and then Pulonium, which is 400 times more radioactive than Uranium. Certainly made the eyes water on the lab table! I also observed that radioactivity occurred at a molecular level within the atoms, they are not inert as first thought. We thought it was curious.
Henri Dubois
This is not exactly ‘ploughing fields’ here. What inspired you to do this ground-breaking work?
Marie Curie
This is the role of science is it not? And for each of us? To expand our knowledge and what is possible? My mother died of Tuberculosis and my eldest sister of Typhoid. My sister and I made a pact to support each other to study and advance. Poland was part of The Russian Empire at the time and the fairer sex could not attend university. So I travelled to the Sorbonne. It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.
Henri Dubois
You believe science is a public good?
Marie Curie
Indeed. I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy. But ultimately good will come of it, for all. Pierre was struck and killed by a horse and carriage in 1907 but I carried on, thrived even.
Henri Dubois
So you’re in the studio, it’s a slow Monday and you say to Pierre – ‘How might we destroy things at a sub-atomic level?’ What’s the Big Idea?
Marie Curie
We got to the root of things first. Our understanding of radioactivity then led to x-ray machines, mobile units in the field during WWI which cut surgery times radically. Our idea was that life has a richness below the atomic level that was yet to be understood and applied.
Henri Dubois
How does an x-ray machine actually work?
Marie Curie
Well, it’s quite jazzy. You speed up electrons and they cast off energy, some of it as x-rays. These pass through muscle but slow through bone. Capture that and you’re in business.
Henri Dubois
I see here you created ‘petite Curies’, mobile x-ray vans to help with rapid diagnosis of injury?
Marie Curie
That’s correct. At the time you had to haul ass back to the surgery or lab to get a lungful of radiation, so we thought: let’s go mobile.
Henri Dubois
Well, that’d make a big difference. Well I’m glad I finally asked. This has been fascinating. You look a little pale, would you like a glass of water?
Marie Curie
No, no – I’m fine, thanks.
