Page 18 - index

Laboratory Leaders

The war ended on 11 November 1918, but Marie and Irène continued their work for another year. In the spring
of 1919, they offered radiology courses to a group of American soldiers who remained in France while awaiting
passage home. In the summer of 1919, Marie summarized their work in her book, Radiology in War. By the fall of
1919, her laboratory at the Radium Institute was finally ready. Marie returned home and devoted the rest of her life
to her work, but she needed to secure enough radium to ensure the Institute’s success.

Securing a gram of radium for the Radium Institute | Marie's final days

After the war ended, Marie campaigned to raise funds for a hospital and laboratory devoted to radiology.
She toured the United States twice (in 1921 and 1929) to raise money for her research.

In 1920, she captured the attention of an American reporter and socialite, Marie Mattingly Meloney who was
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the editor of a women’s publication, The Delineator. American women were interested in Marie’s great work, and
Meloney was granted a rare interview with Marie in her laboratory in Paris.
Meloney learned that what Marie wanted most at this point in her life was some additional radium to continue her
laboratory research, and the American vowed to obtain for her the single gram of radium that Marie requested.
The price for one gram of radium in 1920 was $100,000, and Meloney conducted a nationwide campaign that
succeeded in raising the money, primarily by small donations and the help of many women throughout the United
States. Meloney also persuaded the shy Marie to travel to the US to receive the gift in person. In the spring of
1921, Marie sailed to the US with Irène and Ève, accompanied by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg. They were met
at the New York dock by an entourage of journalists, including 26 photographers.

After a whirlwind tour of public appearances, Meloney and Marie
traveled together to Washington, DC, to receive the radium
from President Warren G. Harding. The evening before the
presentation, however, Marie balked when she discovered that
the gift deed had been made personally to her and insisted that
it be redrawn so the gift from the people of the United States
would instead belong to science. The radium was presented to
Marie in a lead-lined mahogany box on 20 May 1921, by Harding
himself.

Meloney arranged for Marie to write an autobiographical work
for an American publisher that would provide royalty income
for many years. In addition to that, in 1924, Marie published
a biography of Pierre, and continued her work at the Radium
Institute in Paris (where she had been made director in 1912),
alongside her daughter Irene, and her son-in law,
Frédéric Joliot-Curie.
By the end of the 1920s, Marie’s health had begun to deteriorate.
She suffered from fatigue, humming in her ears, dizziness, a low-
grade fever, and gradual loss of eyesight. She was diagnosed
with aplastic pernicious anemia, likely caused by decades
Fig. 4: Meloney, left, with Irene, Marie and Eve Curie of radiation exposure in the lab and during her time spent
performing radiotherapy in World War I.
In October 1929, Marie returned to the United States for another tour and, accompanied by Meloney, spent a
few days in the White House with President Herbert Hoover. The two friends celebrated Marie’s 62nd birthday
at Meloney’s New York home, and Marie spent some time convalescing there because she was ill.

Marie continued her work; however, she focused all of her energy on directing the Institute and each team of
researchers—including Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie (Marie’s daughter and her lab assistant had fallen in love
and married in 1926). One of the researchers working under Marie, Salomon Rosenblum, made a major discovery
in 1929 when his work with actinium (prepared by Marie herself) helped confirm quantum theory. Irène and
Frédéric became the stars of the Institute having discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934. Marie would not live
to see them win the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery.

SCC Quarterly | Volume 5 • Issue 4 | Laboratory Leaders