The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel review – lessons in chemistry | Biography books

To write a biography of a figure as well known as Marie Curie and still offer something fresh or surprising is no easy undertaking. The double Nobel prizewinner is, as author Dava Sobel acknowledges, the only female scientist most people can name. She has inspired more biopics and biographies than I can count, including those written by her two daughters. Parents of young children will have encountered her story in almost every one of the worthy children’s anthologies that adorn school bookshelves: she features in Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, She Persisted Around the World and Little People, Big Dreams.

To help shed new light on such an iconic figure, Sobel, a bestselling writer of science histories, has interwoven her account of Curie’s life and scientific discoveries with those of dozens of female scientists who passed through her lab in Paris.

In doing so, she sets herself a monumental task. Curie’s scientific output was prodigious, her personal life tumultuous and often difficult. She was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Poland in 1867, the fifth child of two schoolteachers. By the age of 10 she had lost her mother and one sister to tuberculosis and typhus. She worked as a governess until the family could raise enough money for her to enrol at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she was one of 23 women and about 2,000 men to join the science faculty. After graduating top of her class, she won a scholarship to continue her studies.

She met her husband, the physicist Pierre Curie, in 1894, while conducting research into the magnetic properties of steel. As newlyweds, they collaborated on Marie’s doctoral thesis studying the unusual energy exuded by uranium. During their investigation of what they would later term radioactivity, they discovered two new elements – polonium and radium – and helped upend everything scientists understood about the material world. Curie’s work would show that atoms were not, as had been believed, indivisible, the fundamental building blocks of our universe. But though the radium that she learned to extract from uranium ore could be used as a cancer treatment, it also caused cancer: many who worked in her lab, including most likely Curie herself, died as a result of their exposure.

Alongside all the firsts – Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and remains the only person to win Nobel prizes in two different fields – she was also a devoted mother and carer for ageing relatives. She experienced the grief of miscarriage, and then in 1906 the earth-shattering loss of her beloved husband, Pierre, in a carriage accident. A few years later, she had an affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin that became a public scandal and virtually forced her into hiding. She lived through the first world war, when she led efforts to bring X-ray units closer to the battlefield to treat wounded soldiers, and drove one such voiture radiologique herself. She lectured far and wide and befriended many great scientists of her time, including Albert Einstein. There is, in other words, much to cover before you even consider the women whose paths briefly crossed with Curie’s until their work or life took them in other directions.

Dava Sobel is a former New York Times science reporter and the author of bestsellers such as Galileo’s Daughter and Longitude, which tells the extraordinary story of how an 18th-century clockmaker solved the greatest scientific problem of his time. She is skilled at explaining complex science clearly and has chosen an artful way to structure her material, emphasising the collision of science and biography by giving each chapter the name of a scientist and an element. But with so much ground to cover, the emotional heart of many stories is lost in a sea of new names, or detailed accounts of important but esoteric work to, say, settle a dispute regarding the half-life of an element.

One particularly intriguing figure is Harriet Brooks, a prominent Canadian physicist who worked briefly at Curie’s lab before giving up her research to marry. Three years later, and despite her own impressive career, she publicly blamed the dearth of female scientists on women’s intellectual and physical shortcomings and suggested that, although Curie was exceptional, her output had declined after Pierre’s death.

What was behind this, I wondered? What did Curie make of it all? We don’t find out. Sobel is unable to tell us much about Curie’s relationships with others in her lab. Many seem to have worked more closely with her colleague, André-Louis Debierne, than with Curie, who was frequently grief-stricken or unwell or occupied with her own work. The scientists’ recorded observations about their boss often do little more than confirm the rather superficial public image we have of her as a sad, reserved woman in a dark formal dress, whose rare smiles were reserved for scientific breakthroughs.

One of the researchers Curie did work very closely with was her eldest daughter, Irène, who would later win a Nobel prize, too. Marie and Irène’s relationship was adoring and apparently – though it is hard to believe this is the whole story – uncomplicated. Sobel does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand the historical importance and context of Curie’s work, but her interior life remains largely mysterious. I found myself itching to consult other sources – her collected letters to her daughters, her mourning journal, the biography written by her other daughter, Ève – in order to fill in the gaps.

I suspect this partly reflects the difficulty of writing about someone so emotionally reserved. When Curie was passed over for entry to the prestigious Académie de Sciences in favour of a less qualified man, for instance, she made no public comment, and at other points of high drama in her personal life she simply threw herself into work. And yet, work was never her whole world – her romantic entanglements and principled political stands suggest she was a woman of many passions, and I wanted to better understand them. At one point, Curie compares herself to a silkworm, writing to her niece of her career that: “I did those things because something obliged me to, just as the silkworm is compelled to spin its cocoon.” But even if Curie lacked insight into her own motivations, you’d want a biographer to advance a few well-supported theories.

Curie once wrote of Pierre that “he lived on a plane so rare and so elevated that he sometimes seemed to me a being unique in his freedom from all vanity and from the littleness that one discovers in oneself and in others”. In Sobel’s telling, Curie strikes the reader as a similarly noble, almost saintly figure – but don’t we all have foibles and flaws? As to the other women Sobel writes about, they are admirable and inspiring, but given such hasty, breathless treatment that they feel as one-dimensional and lifeless as the characters that populate Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls.