Even her cookbook is still highly radioactive. Kept in lead-lined boxes along with her papers from the 1890's, in order to access them, one must wear protective clothing and sign a waiver. And somehow get to Paris, France. Drawn to biographies as a young girl, my favorite was the life and work of Marie Curie.
Despite the saying that opposites attract, her marriage to a man who shared her passions, ironically, in the field of magnetism, then later chemistry and physics, lead to her major distinguishing achievement and contribution to the world. She persisted in getting a foothold in the male-dominated science world, while doing research in a shed. This may or may not be a true fact, the shed.
Isolating isotopes, not realizing the long lasting and far reaching effects her obsession would lead to in the field of future medicine. Tubes of glowing radioactive chemicals in her pockets, at night,..."looked like faint, fairy lights," oblivious that her quest would one day bring her fame as the first and only woman to be awarded Nobel prizes in two different sciences, physics and chemistry, nor that her curiosity would ultimately cause her death.
I picture plants growing greener and flowers larger and more prolific, vines in and out of her work shed, fed by the radiation that would one day drain her very life. Like the areas near the fringes of current day Chernobyl, where the farmers' fruits and vegetables are larger, look more appealing, unless you are warned about the soil they were grown in and the lingering effects of radiation.
Marie had attended The Flying University (also called The Floating University), which was established to provide Polish male and female students higher education at a time when instability in the government prohibited or censored certain teaching. "It was one of those groups of Polish youths who believed that the hope of their country lay in a great effort to develop the intellectual and moral strength of the nation...we agreed among ourselves to give evening courses, each one teaching what he knew best."
Coming from a family of teachers, it was commendable that she chose a difficult road. Or perhaps the road beckoned to her, the road to preserve her native language, the road to explore that which was not known, not familiar. Marie Curie managed to be both wife and mother, scientist and researcher in a time and in a place where a safer path could have been taken.
What fascinated her about radioactivity? What drove her to instill this passion for science in her own daughter? This was the late 1890's, early 1900's...a time of fashion and art changes in France, where she had become a citizen. She could have let her husband, Pierre, take all the credit while she went shopping for dresses of the day, or spend afternoons sipping champagne in gilded restaurants, yet she did not. They worked together, he setting aside his studies because he knew his wife was onto something important, using an instrument he and his brother invented years earlier. Pierre and Marie shared the excitement and drudgery of experiment after experiment. They shared knowledge and life and death. The specific details of her work can be found elsewhere.
The facts I chose to focus on were minimal yet monumental in the sense that teachers, family and passion play a significant role in one person's life, which in turn can influence millions of lives. Or billions. But that is just my viewpoint on how science collided with me.