There's something about Marie!

Dava Sobel has written several outstanding books about the history of science. Longitude, for instance, is on making clocks that keep good time. Here, she examines the life of Madame Curie and the many women she mentored.

Marie Sklodowska Curie is the only individual to have won the Nobel Prize in two scientific disciplines (1903 Physics, 1911 Chemistry) and the first of a short list of women awarded science Nobels. The Polish-born French Professor of Physics faced both rampant sexism and racism during her career.

Her native Poland was under Russian occupation when she was born in 1867, and women were not allowed to attend university. She migrated to Paris, met her husband Pierre Curie (with whom she shared the 1903 Nobel) at the Sorbonne, and was the first woman in France to receive a PhD in physics and become a professor.

However, despite her glittering achievements, she was never elected to the French Academy of Sciences (neither was her daughter Irène Curie, who received a Nobel in Chemistry in 1935). She also had her morals called into question when she entered into a relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin after Pierre died in a road accident. She was never accepted as a "daughter of France" despite spending her working life there and risking her life on the frontlines in the First World War to offer medical aid to French soldiers using her portable X-ray machine.

Curie was often the only woman at scientific conferences, and despite constant ill health (due to exposure to radiation, which almost certainly contributed to her early death in 1934), she travelled across the world evangelising science. She also inspired many women interested in science who ended up at her research lab.

Sobel looks at the lives of 45 of the women Curie mentored. Some among them — such as Marguerite Perey (who discovered francium), chemist Ellen Gleditsch, and Irène Curie — went on to fulfil their potential as scientists. Some others succumbed to prevailing social attitudes, quit research, or dialled down their careers to get married and subsumed their ambitions to do socially acceptable jobs (such as teaching in schools).

This is an interesting perspective for a biography about somebody who has already been written about extensively. The book is strengthened by excerpts, letters, conversations, photographs and the biography written by her daughter to weave the tale of an extraordinary human being and scientific pioneer.

Painfully shy, Curie was utterly focused on her work, even as she juggled her research with the task of educating her brilliant daughters and meeting heads of state on her evangelical tours. The journalist Marie Meloney described her first meeting with Curie thus: "Then the door opened and I saw a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon... I had been prepared to meet a woman of the world, enriched by her own efforts and established in one of the white palaces of the Champs-Élysées or some other beautiful boulevard of Paris." Instead, "I found a simple woman, working in an inadequate laboratory and living in a simple apartment on the meager pay of a French professor."

The book, while unabashedly feminist in approach, underlines the hurdles women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) faced in the early 20th century and, sadly, continue to face in many parts of the world. Those hurdles range from simply not being taken seriously due to their gender to being forced into socially acceptable roles to the detriment of their careers.

Though the coverage of the women scientists is uneven, possibly due to the paucity of data in some cases, the book is well-researched and beautifully written. In her pen portraits, Sobel assigns details about their characteristics that make them easier to recall and manages not to caricature them even when her descriptions are brief.

As always, Sobel is good at breaking down the science and explaining it in non-technical terms. Some chapters are titled with the names of the students conjoined to the elements or isotopes discovered in the lab. Along with the history, we get a sense of the excitement and curiosity that pushed these young women into breaking taboos.

Devangshu Datta is a consulting editor and columnist with a focus on STEM and finance.