A plug for The Elements of Marie Curie, by Dava Sobel

This is a plug, not a review. The full title is The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, by Dava Sobel. The use of “elements” in the title is a pun in more ways than one: besides Mme. Curie’s discovery of radium and polonium, each chapter is related, sometimes very tenuously, to a chemical element.

The book is a scientific biography of Marie Curie and her myriad of protégées. Interestingly, though Madame Curie was sometimes perceived early on as Pierre Curie’s assistant, and as a woman she was not voted into the Académie des sciences, Ms. Sobel gives no indication of any deliberate prejudice. In North America, by contrast, at least one of her protégées was threatened with losing her job if she married, and another simply gave up science upon her marriage.

Dava Sobel is a distinguished science writer with several science biographies to her name. It has been my pleasure to read Longitude, the story of John Harrison, who invented the naval chronometer and should be a household name; Galileo’s Daughter; and The Glass Universe, about how a number of women at Harvard College Observatory revolutionized astronomy, while working essentially for peanuts. In addition, Ms. Sobel has written a play, And the Sun Stood Still, about Copernicus; I was indeed privileged to see the premiere of the play by the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company, as well as an earlier staged reading while the play was being workshopped. All told, depending how you count, Ms. Sobel has written a half-dozen scientific biographies.