The Untold Story of Marie Curie’s Network of Female Scientists
Marie Curie, born more than 150 years ago, is still the only female scientist many people can name. The double Nobel Prize winner is most famous for her discovery of radioactivity, as well as the radioactive elements radium and polonium. She is less well known for encouraging a generation of women who worked in her lab and went on to work in research because of the path she paved. Though few women in science have reached Curie’s level of fame and name recognition, they continue to make gains in the field because of her life and example.
In the new book The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024), author (and Scientific American poetry editor) Dava Sobel chronicles Curie’s life and work, and sketches biographies of many of the women who worked with her. Sobel found that few people are familiar with the network of researchers she nurtured, as well as many other aspects of the famous chemist’s history. “Everybody knows her name, but hardly anybody knows anything about her,” Sobel says.
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