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Although Marie Curie tended to shy away from journalists, she hit it off
with Marie (Missy) Mattingley Meloney, left, editor of a women’s
magazine called The Delineator. Meloney organized Curie’s
1921 American tour and promised to raise $100,000 to buy a gram of radium.
Curie’s daughters Irene and Eve, right, joined her on the tour.
Although six women had previously received honorary degrees from Yale,
at the 1921 Commencement Curie became the first to receive an Sc.D.
Bertram Boltwood, a leading radiochemist, initially balked at a request
to receive Curie in his laboratory at Yale. When Curie did visit him,
he was impressed by her keenness in scientific matters.
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Despite her scientific eminence, a warm
welcome and an honorary degree, the Nobel laureate endured a few slights
during her 1921 visit to New Haven.
By John Curtis
When Marie Curie came to Yale in 1921 to receive an honorary degree,
opinions among the faculty were decidedly mixed. Although six women had
already received honorary degrees from Yale, she was the first to receive
an honorary Sc.D. Her nomination had come not from the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences, but from physicians at the School of Medicine, who had corresponded
with the Nobel laureate about the uses of X-rays and radium. Some chemists
and physicists on the faculty thought the award was a mistake.
Among them was Bertram B. Boltwood, Ph.D., a Yale professor and
a leading radiochemist, who felt that the physicians’ recommendation
was a bit hasty. “When he learned Curie wished to visit him, he
told the Yale administration he had no desire to have the honor thrust
upon him,” said Daniel J. Kevles, Ph.D., the Stanley Woodward Professor
of History. “He considered it the duty of the institution to entertain
her.”
Kevles was one of three panelists to discuss the “Intellectual
Journeys of Marie Curie” at a three-day symposium in November to
celebrate the centennial of Curie’s first Nobel Prize and to honor
women in science. An exhibit at the Cushing/Whitney Historical Library
also examined Curie’s life and legacy.
Curie seems to have been destined to lead an unconventional life. She
was born into a Polish family that included a grandfather who harbored
the revolutionary notion that the children of peasants and nobles should
go to school together. Her father was demoted from his job as a school
headmaster for consorting with “radicals.” Marie Curie herself
was illegally taught the Polish language, history and literature as a
child and got around the ban on higher education for women in occupied
Poland by attending an illegal, clandestine university. She later courted
exile to Siberia for the crime of teaching peasant children to read and
write.
Years later in Paris she would meet and marry an equally unconventional
man. Pierre Curie was an outsider to the French scientific establishment
who had not attended the right schools. In 1903, when he and a colleague
were under consideration for a Nobel Prize, his sense of fairness demanded
that a third collaborator in their studies of radiation also be included.
So it was that Marie Curie received her first Nobel Prize, in physics.
Her second, in chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium, came
in 1911, several years after her husband died in an accident.
Their strongly held beliefs would not allow the Curies to profit
from their discoveries. “They made a deliberate decision not to
patent the process for purifying radium, believing it belonged to the
public,” said Sara Rockwell, Ph.D., professor of therapeutic radiology
and director of the office of scientific affairs at the medical school,
who also spoke at the symposium.
The United States that Curie visited in 1921 offered a bleak landscape
for women in science. They were paid less than men and promoted more slowly.
Most found jobs in women’s colleges that lacked the resources of
larger schools. “Coeds could celebrate Marie Curie, but in the 1920s,
few wanted to emulate her,” Kevles said.
Her tour culminated in a visit to the White House, where President
Harding presented her with a gift of a gram of radium.
Yet even as a Nobel laureate and guest at the White House, Curie
was not immune to discrimination on her American tour. The physics department
at Harvard blocked an honorary degree for her, and rather than address
the question of whether to admit women, the National Academy of Sciences
declined to accept her as a member. And there was her reception at Yale.
Despite Boltwood’s antipathy toward her, the citation that
accompanied Curie’s honorary Yale degree was warm and effusive.
“It is superfluous to mention her discoveries in science and now
she has discovered America. She has often encountered dangers in scientific
experiments, but nothing so dangerous as American Hospitality; it is to
be hoped that she will not be a Woman Killed with Kindness. She is unique.
There is only one thing rarer than genius, and that is radium. She illustrates
the combination of both.”
And eventually, Curie won over even Boltwood.
“In the end,” Kevles said, “Boltwood did receive
Curie in his laboratory and was in fact impressed by her keenness in scientific
matters and also her personal amiability.”
John Curtis is the associate editor of Yale Medicine.
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