When Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, Albert Einstein remarked that she was, "of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted." It has been a century since Curie and her husband, Pierre, who died in 1906, discovered polonium and radium, just a century since she coined the word "radioactivity." Their discoveries brought the Curies worldwide fame, and yet fame, ironically, made the name Curie a by-word for modesty. The laboratory in which their most important work was done was only a former storeroom and machine shop, and they always refused, Marie Curie wrote, "to draw from our discovery any material profit."
A small exhibition devoted to Marie Curie has been mounted at the New York Academy of Sciences. It suggests that the history of radioactivity during the past century divides into two parts, before 1934, when natural radioactivity was the focus of scientific study, and after 1934, when the first man-made radioactive elements were created. Most laypeople are likely to feel that the century divides a little more neatly than that: before 1945, when the first atomic bombs were detonated -- and after 1945.
Marie Curie died as a result of exposure to radioactivity, some of it incurred while preparing radium for medical use.
A century has passed since she first discovered that radioactivity was a property of atoms, and we are still adding up the balance sheet, still trying to weigh the lives saved or improved by the scientific exploration of radioactivity against the lives lost or inalterably worsened.
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