Civil War
Marie Curie, Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, New York) (1921)
Edited by Elena Mejorado (2021)
Marie Curie was a Polish scientist who was born in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland and became one of the most renowned women in the scientific world. When Curie started her scientific career she studied in Paris, France where she focused on physics and eventually chemistry. Curie was married to Pierre Curie, who was a physicist, and they developed a dynamic professional partnership. She was awarded two Nobel prizes for her studies on radium and radioactivity. Her work laid the foundation for the development of nuclear energy and new treatments for cancer. Curie, furthermore, is greatly renowned in the scientific community because of her efforts to improve gender equity among scientists. Her charisma in the field inspired many other women to follow in her footsteps, helping to open a field of science for women that had been the preserve of men. Additionally, she had a major impact during World War I because of her involvement with radiographic mobile units used to examine wounded soldiers. This resulted in the training of over one hundred radiologists and the creation of hundreds of x-ray laboratories. For her studies, she developed a lab in Pierre's memory where she conducted experiments with a small amount of pure radium that she was given through donations.
Marie Curie was invited to the United States several times. The first time she came in 1921, she met President Warren G. Harding and was presented with a gram of radium donated by a group of women who were heavily involved in the scientific field. The speech Curie gave at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York during her first trip to the United States is an important historical document because Curie explained the science behind her experiments and how she came to the conclusions she did. Vassar College was one of the first degree-granting colleges for women and it was significant that she gave the speech here because it was a way to empower and inspire women to continue their scientific studies. Notably, the speech outlines the significance of her work for battlefield medicine during World War I, which reflects the ongoing preoccupation with the War and its aftermath in 1921. This speech also explains the hardships that went along with Curie's studies and how determined she was to analyze the benefits and properties that radium held. At the end, Curie calls upon the women of Vassar College to do further research on radioactivity so that there will always be more contributions in this field of science. Through her 1921 speech at an American women's college, Marie Curie the renowned physicist helped open up the scientific world to women.
Then I took up measurements of minerals and I found that several of those which contain uranium or thorium or both were active. But then the activity was not what i could expect, it was greater than for uranium or thorium compounds like the oxides which are almost entirely composed of these elements.Then I thought that there should be in the minerals some unknown element having a much greater radioactivity rate than uranium or thorium. And I wanted to find and separate that element, and I settled to that work with Professor Curie. We thought it would be done in several weeks or months, but it was not so. It took many years of hard work to finish that task. There was not one new element, there were several of them. But the most important is radium which could be separated in a pure state.
All the tests for the separation were done by the method of electrical measurements with some kind of electroscope. We just had to make chemical separations and to examine all products obtained with respect to their activity. The product which retained the radioactivity was considered as that one which had kept the new element; and, as the radioactivity was more strong in some products, we knew that we had succeeded in concentrating the new element. The radioactivity was used in the same way as a spectroscopial test, The difficulty was that there is not much radium in a mineral; this we did not know at the beginning. But we now know that there is not even one part of radium in a million parts of a good ore. And too, to get a small quantity of pure radium salt, one is obliged to work up a huge quantity of ore. And that was very hard in a laboratory.
...Now, the special interest of radium is in the intensity of its rays which is several million times greater than the uranium rays. And the effects of the rays make the radium so important. If we take a practical point of view, then the most important property of the rays is the production of physiological effects on the cells of the human organism. These effects may be used for the cure of several diseases. Good results have been obtained in many cases. What is considered particularly important is the treatment of cancer. This medical utilization of radium makes it necessary to get that element in sufficient quantities.
...The scientific history of radium is beautiful. The properties of the rays have been studied very closely. We know that particles are expelled from radium with a very great velocity near to that of the light. We know that the atoms of radium are destroyed by expulsion of these particles, some of which are atoms of helium. And in that way it has been proved that they produce at the end ordinary elements, principally helium and lead. That is, as you see, a theory of transformation of atoms which are not stable, as was believed before, but may undergo spontaneous changes.
...There is always a vast field left to experimentation and I hope that we may have some beautiful progress in the following years. It is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent contribution to science.
Curie, Marie. “The Discovery of Radium ... Address by Madame M. Curie at Vassar College, May 14, 1921.” HathiTrust. Accessed September 29, 2021. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112002110515&view=1up&seq=12&skin=2021
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Wood, Francis Carter. “Marie Curie--Her Life Work.” The Scientific Monthly 46, no. 4 (1938): 378–385.
