Free Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull Page A

search for their medical applications. Through her institute Marie was providing shoulders on which the next generation of researchers could stand.
    She ran the lab, keeping forty carefully selected researchers on staff, the best and brightest she could find (though talented women and Poles had a slight edge). Quietly but efficiently, researchers made breakthroughs.
    A medical doctor, Claudius Regaud, headed the side of the Radium Institute devoted to medical advances, primarily in the treatment of cancer. Marie followed the work with great interest but didn’t contribute directly. Her discovery, radium, was now used in radium therapy, called curietherapy. doctors exposed patients to tiny amounts of radiation in the attempt to kill their tumors and cure them. The radium might be implanted under the patient’s skin, injected, or even swallowed! Early radiation sessions were very long, with patients given books to read and—unfortunately—cigarettes to smoke while waiting.
    Between 1919 and 1934, under Marie’s serene guidance, the Institute published nearly five hundred books and papers, while its doctors treated over eight thousand patients. It was a small city, where she kept herself aware of every detail, multitasking her days away for a worthy cause. Marie, according to Regaud, “under a cold exterior and the utmost reserve . . . concealed in reality an abundance of delicate and generous feelings.”
    Among her top priorities was the need to stockpile radium for use at the Institute as well as for scientists all over the world. Unfortunately, radium had become the most expensive substance in the world, approximately $3 million for a single ounce. As much as she hated wasting time with public relations, she did it. Publicity helped get money, and she played a part in exaggerating the highs and lows of her own career—the legend of Marie the martyr—in order to raise precious funds.
    Americans were among her most devoted fans, entranced by the story of Marie. (Except for one chemist at Yale, who once called her “a plain darn fool . . . pathetic,” and later stated, “I feel sorry for the poor old girl.”) Newspapers had headlines like “Curie Cures Cancer!” and “The Greatest Woman in the World.” So to the United States Marie set sail, in 1921, with her two daughters. She did long to see the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls, but the main purpose of the trip was fund-raising. She gave numerous college lectures, shook so many hands she had to wear a sling on her right arm, and collected honorary doctorates, medals, and membership in academies. The president of Harvard compared her to Isaac Newton, while The New York Times called her “a motherly-looking scientist in a plain black frock.” (Her best dress was still the same one she had worn to both Nobel ceremonies.)
    The grand finale was an invitation to the White House, where President Warren G. Harding presented her with a gram of radium, almost doubling what she had. This gram was made possible by a $100,000 gift from the American Association of University Women. To women in America—who’d won the right to vote only a year earlier in 1920—she was a heroine, a role model. She was proof that women, even women with families, could become groundbreaking scientists.
    Madame Curie’s radium stash was unrivaled until the appearance, after 1930, of accelerators that could produce radium in large quantities. Her hoard of radium made a decisive contribution to experiments undertaken for years afterward, especially those performed by Irène Curie, who was maturing into the superstar researcher at the Institute.
    What remained was the still vexing question of how much exposure to radiation was too much. Marie was so determined that radium would benefit humanity that she tended to be blind to evidence that it might also harm. Usually she (as well as other scientists) maintained a certain state of denial about radiation sickness. But her own husband, Pierre, was