The Genius of Marie Curie - The Woman Who Lit up the World

In 1927 the world's greatest scientists assembled in Belgium,

to thrash out some of the most fundamental problems in physics.

29 showed up, 17 of whom would become Nobel prize-winners,

but one of their number could trump them all.

Someone who'd bagged two Nobel prizes in two different sciences.

In a man's world, a woman had broken through - Madame Marie Curie.

This is the story of Marie Curie's life - the adventures

of a woman who refused to conform to the social mores of her time.

A woman who could pop in on presidents, and holidayed with Einstein...

..who once trod the boards on Broadway...

..ran mobile X-ray units on the front as the French battled the Hun...

..who even had duels fought over her.

And wonderfully, for such a fiercely private woman,

we've been left a unique view of her inner struggles in life and love.

Because in the decades that followed her death,

her family released her most intimate letters.

"I am impatient to see you,

"much more than I am uneasy about the difficulties to come.

"It will be good to hear your voice again and see your dear eyes.

"Until Saturday, my darling, I will not stop thinking of you."

The letters reveal the real Marie -

a woman full of passion, an obsessive genius,

whose life was beset by tragedy and scandal.

In every great life, there's a moment that comes to define you.

A moment of crisis that forces you to dig deep

and establish who you truly are.

For Marie Curie, that moment came in the autumn of 1911,

some five years after the tragic death of her husband, Pierre Curie.

She was at the world's first international meeting

of physicists and chemists.

An historic, invitation-only event,

which would become known as the Solvay Conference.

And she was happy -

perhaps because she had just received a telegram confirming

she had won a SECOND Nobel prize.

Or perhaps because she was there with her lover.

Paul Langevin, he was a physicist, and at some point,

he was actually a student of Pierre Curie's.

And he had worked with the Curies.

I mean, certainly both of them knew him.

And he was a physicist of renown - everyone knew who he was.

Most of what we know of their affair comes from the letters that

Marie wrote to Paul.

"The instinct which led us to each other was very powerful.

"I believe that we could derive everything from it - good work

"in common, a good solid friendship, courage for life and even

"beautiful children of love in the most beautiful meaning of the word."

Jeanne Langevin, Paul's wife,

understandably was rather jealous and unhappy about this.

She was a really intense, rather violent woman.

According to a witness, Madame Langevin accosted Marie

in the street, where she threatened to kill her if she didn't leave France.

Marie implored Paul to end the marriage.

"When I know you are with her, my nights are atrocious. I can't sleep.

"I wake up with a sensation of fever and I can't work."

Marie's downfall came when pictures were published of Paul

and her at the Solvay conference.

Enraged, Madame Langevin decided to act.

One day, when she was sure Paul Langevin wasn't there,

she somehow managed to persuade someone

to break into the apartment, where this person found a cache of very

intimate love letters between Marie Curie and Paul Langevin.

Marie came back from her conference to discover that

parts of the letters had been published in the press.

This had suddenly become a very, very public affair.

The press ran a series of scurrilous claims against her.

This venomous publicity stirred up an angry mob,

who surrounded her home and threw stones at the windows.

GLASS SMASHING

The whole affair spiralled into a farcical nightmare.

For Langevin, the final straw came when he read an article

in a newspaper accusing him of hiding behind a Polish woman's skirts.

And for him, that was such an insult to his French dignity

that he challenged the editor of the paper to a duel.

They met at exactly 11 o'clock in the morning.

They paced out 25 yards.

They raised their pistols at each other

and the editor reported afterwards that he looked at Langevin

and he thought, "I can't possibly kill this man.

"He's one of France's greatest scientists!" so he pointed

his pistol to the ground.

So then there was Langevin, and he thought,

"I can't possibly shoot this man. He's not pointing a gun at me,"

so he put his gun down as well.

And that was the end of the duel between them.

Paul Langevin returned to his wife with honour restored

and reputation intact.

Marie fared less well.

Publicly humiliated, she'd lost her companion

and the controversy meant she couldn't continue

the scientific work that had brought her so much happiness.

She fled into hiding with her daughters,

and entered a deep depression.

The story of how Marie Curie ascended to become the world's most

famous female scientist, how she lost it all and subsequently achieved redemption

is one of the greatest sagas in the history of science.

And it starts not in Paris, but a thousand miles away to the east.

Marie Curie was born in obscurity, in a different country

and under a completely different name.

This is the museum of Maria Sklodowska-Curie.

In 1867, on the seventh of November, it was the place where

Maria Sklodowska was born.

From the beginning, Maria, as she'd been christened,

had to face prejudice every day.

Marie Sklodowska was born when Poland was divided by three countries -

Russia, Prussia and Austria.

And in that time, Warsaw was occupated by Russians.

It was forbidden to talk in Polish, to learn Polish history.

To make Polish science.

Indeed, ever since Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815,

Warsaw had been under the rule of Tsarist Russia.

The occupiers set about a cultural cleansing,

banning Polish folk songs and dancing.

Russian became the state language.

So it was in private that her father,

Professor Wladyslaw Sklodowski, sparked her passion for science.

At home he kept a cabinet full of scientific apparatus that fascinated

the young Maria, who by the age of four was already a confident reader.

Later the same year, her mother began to lose weight

and would cough constantly - a sign that tuberculosis was taking hold.

And of course doctors said, you know,

you have to stay of clear your daughter

and so she didn't have a lot of physical affection from her mother.

Her mother finally succumbed to the disease in 1878

when Maria was just 12 years old.

"For many years, we all felt weighing on us

"the loss of the one who had been the soul of the house."

So for most of her formative years, her father raised her as best

he could as a poorly paid teacher.

She adored him and it was from him that she

inherited her questioning nature and her life-long love of science.

EASTERN EUROPEAN FOLK MUSIC

Maria left school aged 15 with a gold medal for topping her year.

But Warsaw University was closed to women,

so she was forced to give up her passion for science.

She abandoned her studies and left to join her relatives in the country.

EASTERN EUROPEAN FOLK SINGING

"We do everything that comes to our minds. Sometimes we sleep

"at night, sometimes during the day. We dance, and in all, we frolic

"so much that sometimes we might deserve to be locked up in a mental home..."

For most girls of her age, finding a good husband was the next step.

But she and her older sister Bronia would break the convention.

MUSIC STOPS

Whoo! Bravo!

APPLAUSE

They concocted an audacious plan that would allow them

both to get a university education.

Maria would remain in the Polish countryside,

to seek work as a governess.

She would support Bronia as she left to study medicine at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

In return, Bronia would later help Maria to join her there.

And so it was that in the winter of 1886, Maria arrived at the family home of a wealthy beetroot farmer...

..the ruins of which still stand on land owned by Teresa Kaczorowska.

Almost at once, Maria felt at home.

Maria taught the Zorawski children upstairs in her little room.

And it was here that one day she met their eldest brother,

a meeting that threatened to derail all her plans.

The rejection of the Zorawski family sent her into a depression

that saw her abandon all thoughts of leaving Poland.

"I have been stupid,

"I am stupid and I shall remain stupid all the days of my life.

"I dreamed of Paris as of redemption,

"but the hope of going there left me a long time ago."

Heartbroken, Maria returned to her ageing father in Warsaw.

And here she may have remained in obscurity, if it wasn't for

what went on in this building, the Museum of Industry and Agriculture,

because behind its impressive facade was a secret Polish laboratory.

This is a very important place in Maria's scientific life. When she was

about 18-19 years old she started to learn here chemical analysis.

The lab was part of the so-called Flying University,

which moved from location to location around Warsaw

to avoid the suspicion of the Russians.

Here, all Poles could advance their education, be they male or female.

"I tried to reproduce various experiments described in treatises

"on physics and chemistry. From time to time a little unhoped-for success

"would encourage me, and at others I sank into despair.

"But on the whole, I discovered my taste for experimental research during these first trials."

Marie had rediscovered her appetite for science. She wrote to Bronia.

"If my coming is just possible, tell me,

"and tell me what entrance examinations I must pass,

"and what is the latest date at which I can register as a student.

"I am so nervous at the prospect of my departure that

"I can't speak of anything else.

Bronia could at last repay her little sister as Maria prepared

to give herself to physics.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the study of physics was a backwater.

In the universities of Europe, it was widely accepted that all

the important laws of nature had been discovered.

Theories of electromagnetism, thermodynamics and mechanics seemed to explain everything.

No-one could foresee that there was a scientific revolution looming,

even less that one of its leaders would be a poor young woman

from Poland who had just enrolled in the physics faculty.

# Leave your home

# Change your name

# Live alone... #

In the spring of 1891, Maria Sklodowska arrived in Paris.

She found herself in France at a time

when there was some ill-feeling towards foreigners.

So to better fit in,

she changed her name to the more Gallic-sounding Marie.

Her university, the Sorbonne, was one of the few elite

European academic institutions that admitted women.

In Britain, it would be the 1920s before Oxford and Cambridge allowed women degrees.

She excelled, graduating first out of her entire year in science.

But life was hard.

After paying rent for her tiny garret room,

she had very little left over for food or fun.

If she was to stay in Paris, she needed a job.

She worked on magnets,

which now might not sound a terribly exciting subject,

but you need magnets when you're making electric motors and dynamos.

This was when the electricity industry was just beginning to take off.

Electricity companies were hungry to improve

the quality of the magnets in their generators

and thereby produce more electricity to keep the lights on.

Marie was hired to help.

She carried out lots of very precise research on exactly what

alloys you use to make a very powerful, very permanent magnet.

Now she needed a lab in which to work.

And thanks to some shrewd matchmaking from a fellow Pole,

she was about to meet lab owner and expert in magnetism, Pierre Curie.

"When I came in, Pierre Curie was standing in the window.

"He seemed very young to me, though he was aged 35.

"I was struck by the expression of his clear gaze,

"and by a slight appearance of carelessness in his lofty stature."

30 years later, she remembered that very first moment that she

saw him across the room and she was terribly struck.

So I guess it was love at first sight.

She moved into the corridor of Pierre's lab

at Ecole de Physique et Chimie and set to work.

Here, an extraordinary romance unfolded.

"He caught the habit of speaking to me

"of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely

"to scientific research, and asked me to share that life."

Marie had her doubts. She was homesick and missed her father.

But Pierre pleaded with her to stay and make a life with him in France.

# Am I to be the one

# To hold you back and make you come my way

# I know I'm the only one to do what's to be done... #

-So where shall I put this?

-Oh, in the cupboard there.

In desperation, he insisted that if she left,

he would throw in his career and follow her to Poland.

He won Marie over.

"It is a sorrow to me to have to stay for ever in Paris, but what am I to do?

"Fate has made us deeply attached to each other

"and we cannot endure the idea of separating."

Marie and Pierre were married on the 26th of July 1895.

# Am I to be the one

# To hold you back and make you come my way

# I know I'm the only one to do... #

They honeymooned on two wheels during the so-called Golden Age of Bicycles.

# Am I to be the one

# To hold you back and make you come my way... #

On the newly invented pneumatic tyre,

they rode far and wide across the French countryside.

# To do what's to be done... #

A year and a half later, still working hard on magnetism,

Marie found herself bearing her first child.

She approached her pregnancy rather like a modern woman.

She went on working right until the very end,

whereas most woman of that period after a couple of months,

they would have completely retired from public view

and they'd have spent a lot of time resting and lying down.

In due course, Pierre's father, Dr Eugene Curie,

delivered Marie's healthy six-pound baby girl, whom she named Irene.

She really didn't want her pregnancy to hinder her work at all,

and she was the sort of woman who was sort of back at the lab bench

within a couple of days of the baby being born.

Indeed, just weeks after the birth,

Marie published her first scientific paper.

It was an important work, which quickly spread

around the world, standardising the manufacturing process of magnets.

But soon after, she abandoned all work on magnetism,

because she'd heard of a stunning new discovery -

one that would be the making of her as a professional scientist.

It was now 1896, and another Paris-based physicist,

Henri Becquerel, was exploring the properties of uranium.

Finishing work early one day,

he placed his materials away in a desk drawer,

leaving a nugget of uranium on top of a sealed photographic plate.

When he opened the drawer the following day and examined the plate,

he saw that it appeared to have been exposed to a bright light.

Serendipity had led Becquerel to the discovery that uranium was

emitting unknown rays that could pass through solid matter.

Nobody had any idea what it was.

It was not seen as a particularly fruitful research topic,

which is probably why she, as a Polish woman, was enabled

to pick it up, because there wasn't a lot of competition for it.

But after publishing, Becquerel promptly gave up on the strange new rays,

leaving the field clear for the Curies.

But how to measure these invisible rays?

Marie needed something more sensitive than a crude

photographic plate.

Fortunately, she'd married a brilliant electrical engineer,

and he designed a way of accurately measuring the strength of any

potential source of these rays.

So this instrument is called ionization chamber.

As Marie Curie did, we just have to put our sample between the two metal plates.

The new rays would then ionise the air between the plates

and a small electrical current would flow to another instrument called an electrometer.

This measured exactly how much current was produced.

The electricity will be transmitted and it will reach

this instrument which is called electrometer.

And then using the piezoelectrical quartz invented

by Pierre Curie, it was possible to measure very precisely the rays emitted

by the sample.

Marie undertook the enormous task of measuring all the metals,

minerals and compounds she could get her hands on, to see

if any others were producing these invisible rays.

And around this time, she started to refer to the phenomenon

she was seeking as radioactivity.

She'd given a whole new area of physics its name.

But Marie's growing obsession with radioactivity came at a price.

Irene, and later her second daughter Eve, were cared for by others.

Her father-in-law took care of her daughters

and that opened things up entirely for her.

He was a widower at that stage,

and I mean literally there were whole years

when he was their caretaker.

There are little suggestions of the daughters being resentful.

And I say this because there were letters -

certainly Irene would write letters and she would say, you know, "When are you going to come home?

"When are you going to be able to read to me

"instead of Grandfather reading to me?"

In time, Irene would understand Marie's passion for science but Eve never would.

And her resentment would remain throughout her life.

Marie continued to work at Pierre's apparatus,

until one day, whilst testing a substance called pitchblende,

she got a result that sent the electrometer off the scale.

This was the highest reading anyone had seen, and since it was so much

stronger than uranium, it must be coming from an entirely new element.

The question was, what was it?

Since pitchblende was a mixture of different elements jumbled together,

somehow she had to free her new element from the compound material.

In Marie Curie's notebooks,

she talks about starting with 100g of material.

We're losing bits all over the place.

You know, really substantial amounts of rock and this is really hardcore physical labour.

You've just got to pound and grind until you've got

a nice, fine, free-flowing material

and at that point you can move really from the engineering into the chemistry.

The next step is going to be to actually try and dissolve it out

and she would have chosen nitric acid - because what she would have

known was that this could dissolve up pretty well any metallic ion.

At this point, Marie Curie would really have been reaching

a kind of branching point,

in that there would have been the immediate question

of where is the radioactivity?

Is it actually soluble in the acid, or is it left behind?

A quick check with the electrometer and she deduced - correctly -

that her new element was in the liquid.

But there was a problem.

The pitchblende only contained a tiny quantity of this new element.

# So I can't get enough of that stuff... #

So to isolate it, she'd have to process

tons of the stuff to find her needle in a haystack.

# And I've tried and I've tried

# But all night I have cried

# No, I can't get enough of that stuff... #

We're standing in the car park of what's now called the ESPCI,

which is a big physics and chemistry institute in Paris.

And behind me here there's a white line on the ground and that marks out one corner of a shed

that Pierre and Marie Curie were given to work in.

# Do you think that's it's smart to pump it through my heart

# No, I can't get enough of that stuff... #

The shed was run down -

draughty and freezing cold in the winter,

stifling hot under the glass in the summer.

And this is where all the horse-carts of pitchblende

would line up and deposit all their deliveries for Pierre

and Marie Curie to refine.

When you think about the kind of lab operations that she was doing,

I mean a lot of it was really kind of repetitive, tedious drudgery

and in a way you wonder what kept her going.

And it's when you start looking at the notebooks that maybe one gets a kind of clue.

And here on the 27th of June 1898 she starts with

180 grams of powdered pitchblende.

But at the end of half a page of description, suddenly there she is -

very large letters saying "300 times more active than uranium".

There was always, in a sense, this sort of little

light at the end of the tunnel which was getting brighter and brighter.

For four years she persevered,

gradually getting closer to isolating her new element.

And as she continued to concentrate the material,

something wonderful unfolded.

Before they started all the experimenting, Pierre had said to Marie,

"I wonder what sort of colour our new product is going to be?"

And he fantasised that it would be some sort of bluey-greeny

magic colour. And that was indeed what happened.

As the pitchblende became more and more concentrated as they went on purifying it,

this sort of strange eerie blue-green glow could be seen all over the walls

of the little shed that they were working in.

MUSIC: "Clair de Lune" by Claude Debussy

And they used to come here at night, and watch it and marvel at it

and they had a family at home, but for them,

it was a scientific child that they had worked on together for so long

and dreamt about it and finally here they were, they were producing it

in this tiny dilapidated shed with a glass roof.

And then you get to page 66 with a big underlined heading

which says "Dosage" - determination.

The 28th of March 1902 - she says 0.1179 grams.

And then there's a quick calculation and at the end of it in really large letters there's "Ra = 225.9".

She now knows the atomic mass

and she really knows exactly where in the periodic table this fits.

This is kind of the moment of triumph.

It's the culmination of years of work. She's arrived.

Congratulations.

After four years of bone-crushingly hard work,

Marie and Pierre had discovered a new element - radium.

Its highly radioactive nature

and eerie green glow set the world alight.

MUSIC: "I Can't Get Enough" by the Dead Brothers

# No, I can't get enough of that stuff

# No, I can't get enough of that stuff... #

I think nowadays we're terribly aware of how dangerous

radiation of any kind can be.

But when it first appeared, it seemed that this new miracle source of energy -

it was a universal panacea - and it was being advertised for

throat medicines, and cough cures, and you could buy radium toothpaste.

It was sort of the new hope for the future.

As the radium craze spread, some could still not believe

the central role Marie had played in the discovery.

There's this marvellous caricature that came out in Vanity Fair

and there's Marie Curie and Pierre Curie in Man of the Year.

And he's there and he's holding up this great big test-tube

and the radium is shining out onto his forehead.

and so his forehead is glowing with genius.

And she's this little diminutive figure behind him

with a hand on his shoulder, sort of peering over him,

and you can almost hear her saying, "Oh, Pierre! You're so clever."

So all the glory of the discovery is being attributed to him.

Even though it was very much a collaborative piece of work.

The years of toil had paid off.

In 1903, the Nobel committee decided to honour

the discoverers of radioactivity.

But in a blatant show of sexism, the committee only nominated

Henri Becquerel and Pierre.

Marie was ignored.

Pierre responded that if this nomination was serious

he could not accept the prize unless Madame Curie's name was included.

The committee was forced to relent,

and all three shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics.

"We have been awarded half of the Nobel prize. We are inundated with

"letters and visits by journalists and photographers, and yesterday

"an American wrote, asking permission to name a racehorse after me."

The Curies were on their way to scientific stardom, but their health

was beginning to suffer from the years of exposure to radiation.

Pierre was feeling especially unwell as he left Marie

on the 19th of April 1906 for a series of appointments in Paris.

Pierre Curie's just had his lunch.

He's in a hurry, he's got to get to the printer's down there.

It was raining - he had an umbrella and he crossed the road.

He slipped onto the cobbles

and he saw these two horses in front of him and he grabbed the harness

and tried to save himself but then he got thrown down on the ground.

And for a moment it seemed that everything was fine.

The carriage missed him but then, just at the last moment,

the back wheels of the carriage swerved and they went right

over his head.

And it crushed his skull and he died immediately.

"I put my head against the coffin.

"And in great distress, I spoke to you.

"I told you that I loved you

"and that I had always loved you with all my heart."

MUSIC: "Adieu Mon Coeur" by Edith Piaf

# Adieu mon coeur

# On te jette au malheur

# Tu n'auras pas mes yeux

# Pour mourir... #

Slowly, Marie emerged from her pain.

Seven months after his death,

she took on Pierre's professorship at the Sorbonne,

supported by her closest friends...

..one of whom, Paul Langevin, had been Pierre's student.

He too was unhappy, trapped in a loveless marriage,

so it was perhaps only natural that the two became close.

So we're standing near the Sorbonne.

Somewhere in the area, Paul Langevin rented a small apartment

and he used to meet Marie Curie there and this is where they

conducted their affair and where their love relationship blossomed.

They were together when Marie's name was put forward for

a second Nobel prize, in Chemistry, in recognition of her work

isolating radium and a second new element, polonium.

To this day, she is the only person

to win two Nobel prizes in two different sciences.

And so it was that she found herself sharing the wonderful news

with Paul at the Solvay conference.

She'd made it to the top table of physics.

But her union with Paul was doomed.

Although in an extraordinary twist,

this would not be the last Curie-Langevin relationship.

Because two generations later, Marie's granddaughter

married Paul's grandson.

And to this day, her grandmother's affair remains a raw subject.

It was a big problem.

There was all the campaigns in the newspapers.

It was not only the Polish woman,

but woman taking the husband in a family

with four children and so on, and so on.

And there was a publication of letters.

When his wife disclosed these supposed love letters,

we think they were real, but we don't know all the details.

My feeling is that really they were falsified.

But nobody took care of this point.

She was a widow, so she was not married

so she was not adulterous in any way.

The problem is, for her, this affair showed that she was a sexual being.

And the reason why that was so damning for her

in ways it would not have been for a man was because it showed that

her science was not nearly as saintly as everyone had made it to look.

Because of course, a woman's sexuality

and her science were somehow seen as one and the same.

I mean, you know, when Einstein had his affairs,

no-one looked at what he was doing in his private life

and what he was doing in his science life as related in any way.

Whether the letters were fake or not, the effect was devastating.

For the French tabloids,

the story of a famous female immigrant ruining the marriage

of a prestigious Frenchman perfectly suited their nationalistic agenda.

She was vilified, hounded

and abandoned by many of her previous supporters.

It was a very difficult period for all the family

and the children in particular.

Somehow, Marie had to find the strength to carry on.

The turning point came when the Nobel committee once again

questioned her suitability for the prize in Chemistry.

Incredulous, Marie rediscovered the inner steel that had got her so far.

She wrote back -

"I believe there is no connection between my scientific work

"and the facts of private life.

"I cannot accept the idea in principle that the appreciation of

"the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slander."

A harder, prouder, more aggressive Madame Curie emerged,

who in her address to the Nobel prize ceremony,

firmly established her ownership of the field of radioactivity.

"The discoveries of radium

"and polonium were made by Pierre Curie in collaboration with me.

"The chemical work aimed at isolating radium was carried out

"especially by me."

With this newfound determination, she set about rebuilding her life.

And though she would never find love again,

she would see her reputation shift once more,

as she took on an almost legendary status.

Marie decided to take charge of her own destiny.

Rather than work in someone else's lab, she would build her own.

She designed her Radium Institute to be a state-of-the-art laboratory

built around a charming little square

where she could indulge her love of gardening.

Here she planted many of the trees and roses that grow to this day.

But her peace did not last, because on the 3rd of August 1914...

..Germany declared war on France.

Fearful of a German invasion of Paris, many fled the capital.

Marie however stayed,

though all work on her new institute stopped.

As the war began to bite, Marie learned that lives were being lost

because the entire French army had only one X-ray station.

So in a moment of organizational brilliance,

she conceived the idea of mobile X-ray units -

small cars adapted to carry their own generator

and lightweight X-ray equipment.

To help the war effort, Marie taught herself to drive,

and took the so-called Petites Curies to wherever they were needed,

where she'd unload the equipment, hook up the generator

and activate the X-ray machine,

with little or no protection from the rays for herself.

But she desperately needed more technicians,

so she brought her elder daughter to the front.

In the 17-year-old Irene, Marie had found a new collaborator,

a relationship that would last until her death.

By the end of the Great War in 1918,

Marie's X-ray units had treated over a million wounded soldiers.

And with the subsequent treaty of Versailles,

Poland was given its independence after 123 years of occupation.

Marie had lived to see her mother-country free at last.

The French government never formally recognised her efforts

during the war, but social attitudes towards Marie did begin to soften.

She returned to the Radium Institute, where she continued

her radioactivity research here in her laboratory.

Marie had never taken out patents on any of her discoveries, so money was

a constant worry and she was running short of her precious radium.

That's why in 1920 - perhaps sensing an opportunity -

she agreed to meet one "Missy" Mattingly Meloney, an American

journalist who had come all the way to Paris to interview her.

Over the course of the interview,

she comes to discover that

Madame Curie, who had discovered radium,

did not actually have a gram of it to run her experiments.

So Meloney decides, "Well, I'm going to start this big radium campaign in the United States,"

and she's the perfect person to do this because of course she's very well-connected.

And indeed she comes back to the United States and within months,

she raises well over the 100,000 she needs for this gram of radium.

MUSIC: "Rhapsody in Blue" by George Gershwin

And so, on the 11th of May 1921,

Marie arrived in New York's Hudson Bay to collect more radium.

It was still incredibly rare

and if she was to ensure her institute's future, she needed more.

Accompanied by her daughters, she'd crossed the Atlantic

on the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic.

She was in her suite and, uh,

Marie Mattingly Meloney, Missy,

warned her that she was going to have to meet some reporters

and that there were photographers and she took a little while

then she finally came out and she was interviewed

by a battery of reporters.

This is where she supposedly said that radium could cure

all diseases, even the very deep tumours.

Marie Curie's name was increasingly being linked to a radical

cancer treatment that she and Pierre had developed.

For cancers that were readily accessible, say on the face,

tiny flecks of radium would be carefully positioned over the tumour.

The radiation would kill the cancer cells.

And if the patient was lucky,

their healthy cells would in time repair the lesion.

Marie herself had little to do with cancer treatment.

Her focus remained purely on radioactivity research.

But Missy was a master of spin. She knew that selling a dedicated

scientist to the American public would be tough.

She needs to make her look likeable.

But that also means making her look appropriate.

She has to depict her

not as scientist at all but as this maternal figure,

who of course didn't actually discover radium because she was

doing science for science's sake like men do, she was doing it because

of course she wanted to rid humanity of cancer, like any good mother

would want to and this is really why she discovered radium. And so this

is the publicity that Curie walks into when she comes to New York in 1921.

MUSIC: "Freddie Freeloader" by Miles Davis

Marie began a series of public engagements

that Missy had laid on that would last for eight weeks.

"The programme seemed very intimidating.

"It was assumed that I would not only attend a ceremony at the White House

"but also visit many universities and colleges in several towns.

"Some of these institutions had contributed to the fund.

"All desired to offer me honours."

The timing of her coming to the United States was not a coincidence.

Women had just won suffrage in the United States in 1920.

They're just starting to get the right to vote in this country.

So she's thinking she's a very good role model for American women.

Marie Curie began her US tour here in the city of New York.

And it was immediately clear that amongst American women,

she had become a star.

We're here in Carnegie Hall and I'm thinking back to May 18th, 1921,

when Marie Curie was honoured.

APPLAUSE

We know that when Marie Curie entered, there was

thunderous applause and the applause took maybe five minutes to die down.

The event was sponsored by American university women

and it was a celebration of Curie but it was also a celebration of, really,

higher education for women in the United States.

According to newspaper accounts, there were supposedly 3,500 women in attendance.

The colleges decorated the hall with their banners.

It must have been very colourful. Certainly very exciting.

Marie was an instant hit.

And all the while as she toured the States,

Missy worked hard to protect the legend she was creating.

Everybody was very good about not mentioning the scandal,

the sex scandal in Paris. And of course, remember, this was

Meloney making very clear, "When you cover her, do not discuss this."

Exhausted, Marie finally arrived in Washington

for her last appointment at the White House itself.

"It was a deeply moving ceremony in all of its simplicity.

"It comprised a short presentation by the French ambassador,

"a speech by Missy Meloney on behalf of the American women,

"and then the address of President Harding."

MUSIC: "Rhapsody in Blue" by George Gershwin

At last, she received what she'd come to America for.

When Harding hands her the ceremonial box of radium, he says

"This is a gift from the American people," and he even goes so far as to say, you know,

"We are just in awe of you, not only for your science but

"because you did all this, and still were the perfect wife and mother."

Marie returned to France with her name restored

and the future of her beloved Institute secure.

She would return again to America to collect more

radium for a second Radium Institute in Warsaw she was helping to establish.

But it would take an even greater toll on her failing health.

Soon after she came home, she wrote to Missy.

"My very dear friend, your letter distressed me.

"I did not know that you had a bad accident.

"I too had troubles, a kind of general disease which obliged me

"to take a very strict diet, probably to last for the future."

After years of ill health,

her family helped nurse Marie during her final months.

Eve really comes to terms with her mother later in life.

She's the one that really cares for her in her final days.

And I think that there's a sort of reconciliation, but it was

a very um...I mean, the relationship between them was torn for some time.

It took her mother dying, I think,

and her being there to take care of her for them to sort of reconcile.

On the 4th of July 1934, Marie Curie died, aged 67,

with Eve by her side.

Her doctor gave the cause of death as aplastic pernicious anaemia.

Her bone marrow had been injured by the long accumulation of radiation.

So it seemed her child, radium, had killed her.

She was buried in this cemetery just outside Paris,

where she shared a grave with Pierre.

And here they lay together for over sixty years.

Until one spring day in 1995,

when radioprotection expert Jean-Luc Pasquier came to examine her remains.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

Since the half-life of radium is 1,600 years,

they were worried that Marie was still radioactive,

because they were about to move her body.

This surprised everyone, because if the myth was correct

and radium exposure had made her a martyr to her science,

her remains should still exceed today's safe levels.

So it led the team to speculate that something else had caused her premature demise.

If X-rays killed Marie, then she was a different kind of martyr.

Her life ended prematurely - like so many others -

as a result of her efforts in the Great War.

A few days later, here in the heart of Paris,

the Curies were given a full state funeral.

# Adieu mon coeur... #

This square and the street down there are absolutely packed with people,

and there's a big white carpet coming all the way

up the street, across the square and up the steps into the Pantheon.

# ..mes yeux

# Pour mourir... #

They'd made it into France's national mausoleum.

# Adieu mon coeur... #

In a sense, it was a final journey for Pierre and Marie Curie

but for Marie Curie in particular, it was a very momentous occasion,

because she was the first woman to be buried in the Pantheon

as a tribute to her own individual achievements.

At last, France had made it up to Marie Curie.

This brave, brilliant Polish scientist, so cruelly

shamed in life, had received her adopted country's highest honour.

# Autrefois tu respirais le soleil d'or

# Tu marchais sur des tresors

# On etait vagabonds

# On aimait les chansons C'a fini dans les prisons... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd