Free Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull

about everything, she trained 150 women technicians to go to the war front.
    By 1916, she was director of the Red Cross Radiology Service, overseeing mobile X-ray units, which became known as “little curies.” She was unstoppable, unflappable, ingenious. Again proving herself to be her mother’s daughter, she even mastered the basics of car repair so she could take care of breakdowns on the field herself.
    She was more than ably assisted by Irène, who was unusually intrepid for her age. Irène taught radiology classes to the military doctors and nurses, went to battle sites and performed X-rays herself, and drew diagrams showing exactly where to operate, sometimes arguing with doctors suspicious of her expertise. She described one doctor as “the enemy of the most elementary notions of geometry” while he was probing a patient’s wound. Neither Irène nor Marie bothered to take any precautions against excessive exposure to X-rays, the dangers of which were little known at the time.
    Marie’s contributions to the war didn’t end with her fleet of X-ray units. In 1917, she also assisted Paul Langevin in inventing an early form of sonar that could capture ultrasonic vibrations—from deadly German submarines, for example.
    Paint containing her discovery, radium, also proved useful to the military. Soldiers in the trenches were wearing a new type of watch, one that strapped onto their wrists. The soldiers needed to be able to tell time in the dark. Radium-based paint was used to make luminous numbers on the watch faces, as well as to highlight the dials of instruments on ships, planes, and tanks.
    After four long years, World War I ended in November 1918. The joint forces of France, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States finally defeated Germany and its allies.
    On the day victory was announced, Marie was in her lab. It was a day for celebration, and she rushed out to buy red, white, and blue material. With help, she sewed giant French flags to hang from the windows. She rejoiced further when news broke that for the first time in 123 years, Poland was liberated from foreign rule. An independent nation once again. Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the famous pianist and an old friend from her early Paris days, became free Poland’s first prime minister.
    In France, the war had left one out of every six young men in the army dead—1,333,000. The figure would have been even higher had not more than a million X-ray procedures been performed on wounded soldiers. A medical technique in limited use before 1914 became standard practice by war’s end. American military doctors, before leaving for home, got training from Marie in X-ray procedures. After this, no surgeon would think of removing a bullet without precise knowledge of its location. This was due in large part to Marie Curie.
    Now that it was peacetime, she did what she always did—she got back to work. The first order of business was writing Radiology in War . The beneficial use of X-rays was proof that pure science improved lives, although “only through peaceful means can we achieve an ideal society.”
    Madame Curie was now at the high point of her fame. And as Einstein pointed out, “Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.” By now, she’d learned that fame could be useful, after all—a tool for fulfilling her humanitarian wish to “ease human suffering.”
    The world “needs dreamers,” she said, and society should support them so that their lives “could be freely devoted to the service of scientific research.” She hoped to carry her words into action through the Radium Institute, her ultimate and long-postponed dream. After the war, in 1918, the buildings—two pavilions, with a rose garden in between—were opened at last.

CHAPTER TEN
    Madame Curie
    M ARIE CURIE’S RADIUM Institute became one of the great research centers of the world. Its purpose was to study the chemistry of radioactive substances and to