Imagine having to make do with primitive lab facilities to undertake pioneering research. Imagine not being fully acknowledged for revolutionary scientific work because of the belief that women scientists could only play a supporting role when it came to significant research. Imagine being plagued by ill health and unbearable fatigue, directly resulting from the kind of research work engaged in, but carrying on regardless, with an almost maniacal devotion, not to mention severe bouts of depression and the strain of dealing with scandalous gossip and xenophobia.

Madame Curie took all this and more in her stride and in addition, produced trendsetting scientific work that took the world by storm.

An outstanding scientist of many firsts, Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice (1903 in Physics, and 1911 in Chemistry), the first woman to get a Ph.D. in France, the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne, and in later years, the first Nobel Laureate whose child too went on to win a Nobel Prize, her first-born, Irene, having won it in Chemistry in 1935. Not just that, till today, she remains the only person, man or woman, to be honoured with the Nobel Prize in two different sciences. In a way, Marie Curie’s life shines a light on how excelling in scientific work was doubly difficult for women during her time, and how her determination to achieve her goals despite formidable barriers, has paved the way for other women scientists to follow in her footsteps.

Early Life in Poland

Born Maria Sklodowska in 1867 in Warsaw, in Russian-occupied Poland, Mme. Curie grew up under the shadow of tyrannies inflicted by the Russian regime. With university education being out of bounds for Polish girls under the Russian rule, in the beginning, Maria’s father, a teacher of physics and chemistry, sent her and her elder sister Bronya to a floating night university that held classes for young women clandestinely in different private residences.

However, the two sisters had set their hearts on pursuing higher studies in Paris, something their father could ill afford. Maria worked as a governess for three years to help her father pay for Bronya’s medical studies in Paris, so Bronya, after starting her practice, could then help pay for her own educational costs there.

An outstanding scientist of many firsts, Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice (1903 in Physics, and 1911 in Chemistry), the first woman to get a Ph.D. in France, the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne, and in later years, the first Nobel Laureate whose child too went on to win a Nobel Prize, her first-born, Irene, having won it in Chemistry in 1935. Not just that, till today, she remains the only person, man or woman, to be honoured with the Nobel Prize in two different sciences.

University education in Paris

When Maria finally went to Paris in 1891, she was 24. She took on the French name Marie, enrolled at the Sorbonne, and notwithstanding limited resources, got her Master’s degree in physics in two years, and a year later, a second degree in mathematics. Some French scientists, impressed by Marie’s aptitude for learning and research, helped her complete the second degree by getting her a scholarship meant for an outstanding Polish student.

While studying for her Master’s in mathematics, Marie got a job from the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry for carrying out research relating magnetic properties of different steels to their chemical composition. But, she needed a lab to do the commissioned work. A Polish professor she knew introduced her to his colleague, Pierre Curie, who though holding a low-profile position as the laboratory supervisor at a municipal industrial school, was already well-known for his pioneering research on magnetism and the precise instruments he had invented for his work.

Pierre was then 34 and still living with his parents. With Marie sharing space with him in his lab, the relationship between the two of them transitioned from intellectual affinity and mutual respect to love. This development in the lives of Marie Sklodowska and Pierre Curie would dramatically change their personal lives and the course of science.

A dynamic couple obsessed with research work

Pierre, who had done enough seminal research over the past 15 years to earn him a doctorate, was stagnating at the bottom of the academic ladder. Marie motivated him to complete writing his research paper on magnetism and in March 1895, he was awarded the doctorate degree and also offered a professorship at the municipal trade school with a slightly higher salary.

In July that year, Marie and Pierre were married in a simple civil ceremony. When a family member offered to buy her a wedding dress, Marie requested that it be “practical and dark” so she could “put it on afterward to go to the laboratory”. The couple used the money they were gifted at their wedding to buy bicycles for themselves and spent the summer cycling through the countryside. In the years that followed, they continued to go on long cycle rides whenever they wanted to relax.

Ground-breaking discoveries

On completing her research on the magnetic properties of steel, though Pierre and she were barely managing to make ends meet, Marie used part of the payment she received to return the scholarship money she had received as a university student, although she was not required to. She repaid it to help some other deserving Polish student pursue advanced studies.

Choosing to work on the largely ignored Becquerel rays for her thesis, Mme. Curie, like other scientists, was baffled about the source of the high-energy radiations emitted by uranium compounds. She put forward a daring hypothesis postulating that these emissions could be a property built into the very structure of the atoms of uranium. Till then, the atom was thought to be indivisible and nobody had as yet understood the inner structure of an atom or the immense energy it contained. Mme. Curie was also sure a small sample of pitchblende she was testing could contain some undiscovered elements.

By now, hugely interested in what Marie was researching, Pierre gave up his work on crystals and joined her to expedite the new discoveries – two new elements they named ‘polonium’ (after Marie’s native country) and ‘radium’ (derived from a term Marie was to coin). The Curies published papers on the two new elements they had discovered. Marie invented the word ‘radioactive’ to describe them, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Pierre was then 34, and still living with his parents. With Marie sharing space with him in his lab, the relationship between the two of them transitioned from intellectual affinity and mutual respect to love. This development in the lives of Marie Sklodowska and Pierre Curie would dramatically change their personal lives and the course of science.

Nobel Prizes: Appreciation and Agony

Marie, with the help of Pierre, spent almost three years, arduously processing over a ton of pitchblende to isolate one decigram of radium chloride and finally presented her doctoral thesis on ‘Research on Radioactive Substances’ in June 1903. Those reviewing her thesis commented that Mme. Curie’s findings represented the greatest scientific contribution ever made in a doctoral thesis. True to character, Marie bought a black dress to wear to a small private celebration to felicitate her achievement of being the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in France, so that just like the navy-blue dress she had worn at her wedding, she could wear this one too in the lab without any stains showing.

Later that year, Marie and Pierre along with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their revolutionary work on radioactivity. But, Marie almost didn’t get the honour. A few scientists believed only Becquerel and Pierre could have done all the hard work and had objected to Marie’s inclusion. The award citation itself avoided any specific mention of the Curies’ discovery of polonium and radium as some chemists on the nominating committee insisted that the Curies could deserve a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in the future once they isolated the new elements in more substantial amounts.

The Nobel Prize brought the Curies international recognition and improved their life somewhat. However, upholding the humanitarian ideals of science, they refused to patent their discovery of radium and cash in on the demand for it, making all their research work publicly available. Experts who visited their ‘lab’ were stunned that Mme. Curie could have accurately determined the atomic weight of radium in such dinghy conditions. In recognition of their award-winning work, the French government finally offered Pierre professorship at the Sorbonne in 1904 and promised him a new lab.

Working with radioactive substances had already begun taking its toll on Marie’s and Pierre’s health. The skin on their hands was cracked and scarred and they experienced weakness in their limbs due to the radioactive emissions corroding their bones. Today, the notebooks in which they recorded their work are kept under lock and key because of how highly radioactive they are. Those who need access to them have to do so at their own risk. In fact, due to ill health and their on-going work, the Curies could travel to Stockholm only in June 1905, thus receiving their award two years after it was announced. When Pierre delivered the acceptance lecture, he made it a point to distinguish between Marie’s independent research work and the work on which they had collaborated.

The very next year, Pierre died tragically on being run over by a fully-laden, horse-drawn wagon, and then Marie went through another bout of depression. Instead of a widow’s pension, in 1908, she accepted the offer to teach at the Sorbonne in Pierre’s place, becoming the first woman to teach there.

In 1911, just when she was selected for a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium, the French press was awash with slanderous articles about her alleged affair with one of her late husband’s most brilliant students, Paul Langevin, a married man already living apart from his wife. Marie was painted as the foreign home wrecker who had destroyed a French woman’s marriage. Pressurised by some not to go to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize because of the scandalous stories in the press, Marie went there, all the same, deciding to stand up for the integrity of her work. “I believe there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life,” was her reply to one critic. In her acceptance speech, she paid a tribute to Pierre, besides also describing her independent work.

Later life

Marie was getting ready to set up the Radium Institute in Paris when World War I broke out. Appalled by the way military hospitals were operating without X-Ray equipment, sometimes chopping off limbs that could have been saved, she set up around 20 mobile X-ray stations for treating wounded soldiers on the frontlines, sometimes driving one of the cars and even operating the machines herself. In addition, she helped set up around 200 permanent X-ray centres during the war.

Established with help from philanthropists, the French government, and friends and well-wishers from the US and other parts of the world, the Radium Institute is a world centre for radium research.

Madame Curie died on 4 July 1934 of a blood disorder that had gone undetected for some time. Though she and Pierre were first buried in the Curie family plot near Paris, their remains were re-interred in 1995 in the Pantheon, France’s national mausoleum for eminent French citizens. On that occasion, the then French President, Francois Mitterrand paid a tribute to Pierre and Marie and a special one to Marie saying, “As the country bows before her ashes… I form the wish, in the name of France, that everywhere in the world the equality of the rights of women and men might progress.”

References

1. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014: Marie Curie – Facts – https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1911/marie-curie-facts.html
2. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014: Marie and Pierre Curie and the Discovery of Polonium and Radium – https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/themes/physics/curie/
3. American Institute of Physics, Naomi Pasachoff: Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity – https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/polgirl1.htm
4. Julie Des Jardins: Madame Curie’s passion – Smithsonian magazine, October 2011
5. Sara Rockwell: The life and legacy of Marie Curie – Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 76(4-6), 2003
6. The Biography.com website: Marie Curie Biography.com – https://www.biography.com/people/marie-curie-9263538
7. Robert Krulwich: Don’t Come to Stockholm! Madame Curie’s Nobel Scandal – National Public Radio, 14 December 2010

Sir Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937)
The Founder of Nuclear Science

A passionate, indefatigable researcher, Sir Ernest Rutherford is acknowledged to have initiated the era of big science around the dawn of the 20^th century. His remarkable discoveries of the concept of radioactive half-life, of the alpha and beta particles, the atomic nucleus, and the proton inspired many more scientists such as Niels Bohr to carry out further research in atomic science. But it was his ground-breaking discovery, that an atom is mostly empty space and that almost all of its mass was concentrated in a tiny nucleus at the centre, that set the stage for the commencement of nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry.

Rutherford’s extensive body of research won him so many awards, it is believed that his collection of medals is the largest ever awarded to any one scientist. Quite rightly, one of his recent biographers, John Campbell, paid him the ultimate tribute referring to him as the ‘Scientist Supreme’, even going on to add: He (Rutherford) is to the atom what Darwin is to evolution, Newton to mechanics, Faraday to electricity, and Einstein to relativity.

The celebrated scientist Sir J. J. Thomson, discoverer of the first subatomic particle – the electron, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906, mentored Rutherford as a postgraduate student from 1895 to 1898. Greatly impressed by his new student, not by his height, athletic built, and vivid blue eyes, but his potential for scientific work, he said, “I have never had a student with more enthusiasm or ability for original research than Mr. Rutherford.”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry that Rutherford was awarded in 1908 for “his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances” was a recognition of the significance of his scientific work and his stature as an exceptional researcher. Not just that, Rutherford’s boundless enthusiasm for original research was so inspiring that an astonishingly large number of scientists who carried out research under his guidance or alongside him, namely, James Chadwick, Cecil Powell, Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, Frederick Soddy, John Cockcroft, Ernest Walton and Edward Appleton went on to become Nobel Prize winners too.

Early Life

Ernest Rutherford was born on 30 August 1971 in rural Spring Grove (now called Brightwater), not far from the town of Nelson in New Zealand’s South Island. The fourth child of James Rutherford, a farmer, and Martha Thompson, a teacher, he was one of 12 children. His mother believed ‘all knowledge is power’, and so, despite money being tight, she and Rutherford’s dad made sure all their children were well educated.

Rutherford had a hard life as a boy and is known to have famously said that his inclination towards innovative research sprang from having had to find inventive ways of living with limited resources in a poor family. He said as a child he used to tell himself, “We haven’t got the money, so we’ve got to think.”

Having earned a scholarship in 1890 to study at the University of New Zealand’s Canterbury College in Christchurch, Rutherford graduated with three degrees in four years. A B.A. in pure mathematics and Latin (both compulsory subjects), applied mathematics, English, French, and physics in 1892; an M.A. with double first-class honours in mathematics and mathematical physics, and also in physical science (electricity and magnetism) in 1893; and just one year later, on the strength of the independent research he carried out on the ability of high-frequency electrical discharge to magnetize iron, he got his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and geology.

In 1895, Rutherford won another scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies in the UK. At 24, armed with his three degrees, he joined the University of Cambridge where he began studying and researching at the Cavendish Laboratory headed by J. J. Thomson. He was the first non-Cambridge research student to study there.

Revolutionary scientific contributions

Thomson was tremendously taken up by the kind of advanced research Rutherford was capable of at a young age. So, in 1902, when Montreal’s McGill University was looking for a new Chair of Physics, he recommended Rutherford for that position. Rutherford was just 27 when he sailed to Canada to accept the professorship at McGill. It was here that he carried out the research that won him the Nobel Prize – research on the radiations emitted when radioactive elements decayed. But by the time he got the award in 1908, he had already moved back to the UK where he was appointed as the Chair of Physics of the University of Manchester.

Rutherford made his most important discovery after being awarded the Nobel Prize. The University of Manchester was where, under his guidance, his researchers Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden carried out the famous gold foil experiment. The astonishing results of this experiment led to Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus in 1910, and to his nuclear model of the atom replacing J. J. Thomson’s earlier plum pudding model.

In 1912, fascinated by Rutherford’s discovery, Niels Bohr, then a young 26-year old researcher joined his laboratory in Manchester as a research student. Bohr adapted Rutherford’s atomic model to Max Plank’s quantum theory, resulting in the first quantum model of the atom – the Rutherford-Bohr atom. After that, Rutherford and Bohr became close friends and in later years often spent vacations together along with their wives.

Continuing with his experiments in atomic science, a few years later, in 1917, when Rutherford bombarded nitrogen atoms with alpha particles and converted them into oxygen atoms, he not only became the first scientist to split the atom, he also turned out to be the world’s first successful alchemist. The results of this research were published in 1919. That same year, things came full circle for him when he moved back to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge where he had first started his research work in the UK with J. J. Thomson as his mentor. Only, this time he was there to be made the Director of the Laboratory and its Professor of Physics following the retirement of Sir J. J. Thomson.

Awards and honours

Rutherford was awarded numerous prestigious medals, prizes, honorary degrees and doctorates from different countries, in addition to fellowships of reputed societies and organisations. He was also the President of the Royal Society. He continued to be honoured even after his sudden death in 1937. Several countries including New Zealand, the UK, Sweden, and Canada issued postage stamps in his honour, and buildings and institutions in different parts of the world were named after him. In 1969, element 104 was named rutherfordium as a tribute to him. In 1991, the Rutherford Origin, an attractively set up outdoor display of Rutherford’s life and scientific work built on the site of his birth was opened in the presence of his grandchildren. In 1992, New Zealand issued a new $100 banknote featuring his portrait.

Rutherford was knighted in 1914, and given the title of Sir Ernest Rutherford. In 1925, he was appointed to the Order of Merit. When he visited New Zealand that year to deliver public lectures and visit his aged parents, he was felicitated as an illustrious New Zealander. People packed the halls where he delivered lectures on the structure of the atom.

But this also turned out to be his last visit to his home country. He died unexpectedly in Cambridge on October 19, 1937 at the age of 66 following surgical complications. A small delay in being operated upon for a partially strangulated umbilical hernia could possibly have led to his untimely death.

Rutherford’s ashes were interred in the nave of Westminster Abbey close to the tombs of Sir Isaac Newton and Lord Kelvin. Three years later, the remains of his mentor, Sir J. J. Thomson were buried next to him.

References

1. NobelPrize.org: Ernest Rutherford – Biographical – Nobel Media AB 2014, http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1908/rutherford-bio.html
2. Famous Scientists: Ernest Rutherford – www.famousscientists.org/ernest-rutherford
3. John Campbell: Rutherford – A Brief Biography – The World and I magazine, June 2011
4. John Campbell: Rutherford, Ernest – Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3r37/rutherford-ernest
5. New Zealand History: Ernest Rutherford Biography – https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/ernest-rutherford
6. Biography.com: Ernest Rutherford – Physicist, Scientist (1871 – 1937) – https://www.biography.com/people/ernest-rutherford-39099