It was alchemy made reality, though stained with radioactive instability.Įve was the black sheep of the family, an artist instead of a scientist. Irene was the scientist, following closely in her mother’s footsteps, specializing in radioactivity and winning her own Nobel Prize in 1935 for managing to transmute elements from one to another. When the First World War scorched the north of France, Irene joined her mother in the hospital tents, using primitive X-ray machines to locate shrapnel in wounded soldiers, a torrent of radiation burned into patient and doctor for every life saved.
The two sisters diverged early, Irene following her parents into science, Eve turning to the humanities. Imagine being home schooled by your friends’ parents, all of whom used Nobel Prizes and the like as paperweights. For a couple of years, their education was seen to by a commune of geniuses, as the Curies and several other notable intellectuals simply took turns teaching all of their respective children. Irene and Eve were born seven years apart in France, right around the turn of the century. Her two daughters on the other hand are a story waiting to be told. But Marie’s history is relatively well known, still taught in the history books, the subject of several films. Her journals and papers are still so radioactive today that they are stored in lead lined boxes and cannot be handled without protection. She died at age 66 due to complications of decades of exposure to radiation. Curie is still the only person to receive two Nobel Prizes in different sciences, work that did not come without a steep price. Her name is synonymous with radioactivity, not just because she invented the term “radioactivity” but because the unit of measure for it is her last name. Marie Curie is a household name in the right sorts of households, the woman who walked into the fraternity of nineteenth century physics and carved out a legend for herself.
0 kommentar(er)
