PURITY OF SOUL THAT FAME COULD NOT CORRUPT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23275, 18 February 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

PURITY OF SOUL THAT FAME COULD NOT CORRUPT

By NOVOCASTRIAN

TN the front rank of the scientists of our day, who have enlarged the bounds of' knowledge . and by their discoveries contributed to human well-being, is the name of a woman —Marie Curie. She was a Pole, the daughter of a Polish professor, and one of a family singularly alert and habituated to frank discussion among themselves. Her father was something more than a scientist. He read David Copperfield to, his children, translating it perfectly into Polish as he read from the English text. Not a Highbrow

And Marie .was no mere highbrow. We are told of a gay party when she "used up her shoes of russet leather in one evening's-dancing." But science was the supreme love of both father and daughter, and in her earliest childhood Marie was entranced by the glass case which contained the professor's "surprising and graceful" - instruments, In her teens she was admitted to the "Floating University," where secret lessons were given to * a handful, of young Poles in their own forbidden language, both teacher and pupila being in constant fear of interruption and arrest by the Russian P °Tjiere it was that she first entered a science laboratory and found her vocation. Returning - home one night "an exaltation different from all she had known kept her from sleep. She felt herself "summoned to obey a secret order," and consecrated her life to the tasks that brought her lasting mind was set on Paris and the classes of the Sorbonne and thither she came in her early twenties, To accomplish h<sr dream she practised the most rigid economies. A wooden box contained her scanty wardrobe and belongings. She crossed Germany in the fourth class, travelling in a carnage without compartments, bare as a goods' van. with a bench on four sides. But says iier daughter. Mane tasted her divine joy." -

Home in an Attic In Fans she lived in the Quartier Latin, devoted absolutely to study. Her iiorae for three years was ur a sixth-floor -attic, which had no hghting save from a loophole in the roof. Its meagre furniture consisted of a petroleum lamp "covered with a twopenny shade," an alcohol heater about the size of a saucer,' and a few pitiful cooking utensils. She allowed herself two sacks of coal for the bitter winter "bought from the merchant at the corner and carried up the steep stairs a bucketful at a time." And thus, with a will that had the fortitude of iron, the ardent girl worked unsparingly till in the small hours of the morning, she' cast herself fatigued upon her bG It was during these strenuous years that she met Pierre Curie, who was engaged in research work at the Sorbonne in magnetism and electricity. They were kindred spirits, sharing equally the passion for science, and later a marriage of perfect accord an happiness took place. Seeking for a subject for her doctorate, Marie became interested m the recent discovery of Henri Becquerel that uranium salts spontaneously emitted rays of an unknown nature, and aided by her husband she began a study of 'substances which gave rise to this mysterious radiation, to which she gave the name, radio-activity. Wo laboratory was available at the Sorbonne and tliey were compelled to j?ork

Madame Marie Curie's Service to Mankind

"Look, look," said Marie; and Bho went cautiously forward, looked for and found a straw-bottomed chair and sat down: in the darkness. Their two face 3 turned toward the pale glimmering, the mysterious sources of radiation! It was the first radium the world had seen. It was in 1902 that the great discovery was made, and within four years M. Curie had met his death in a street accident and Marie was left alone. They had long before discussed what effect such a separation might have upon the scientific work in which they had been bo intimately united, and Pierre had said: "Whatever happens, even if one has

under the most primitive conditions in an abandoned shed which had previously done duty as a dissecting room. It was without a floor and its only furniture, when they obtained possession, consisted of a few kitchen tables and a rusty stove. Here, for four momentous years, they pursued their investigations. They submitted to analysis pitchblende, a costly ore of uranium found chiefly in Czechoslovakia. As they proceeded they discovered a new element which they named Polonium, after Marie's native country. But, vastly more important, they became assured that yet another element existed, radio-active far beyond all other known substances. To this Mme. Curie gave the name Radium before it was actually _ isolated. And few stories in modern science are more stirring than that of the evening when the Curies, restless at home as their experiments reached their climax, returned to their laboratory to examine the result of the day's work, and found in the tiny glass receivers the "phosphorescent bluish outlines" of the precious radium particles. World's First Radium

to go on like a body without a soul, one must work just the same." The word thus spoken became a law to Mme. Curie. For thirty lonely years she carried on her labours with stoical courage and at the age of sixty-five was still working over -twelve hours a day. But soon such devotion came to an end, and they laid her -to rest, "her rough hands, calloused, hardened, and deeply burned with radium," one of the "eventual victims," as Professor Claude Regaud said, of the radio-active bodies which sho- and her husband discovered. Publicity Avoided She neither sought nor valued for its own sake the fame of the world; "She did not know how to be famous," said her daughter. She was ill at ease amid the honours that were showered upon her in later life and constantly avoided publicity. At one great gathering the gems worn by the ladies in attendance amazed her, "I did not know," she said, "that such jewels existed." And to Pierre sho confessed that she had been counting how many laboratories might have been endowed "wftth the gems each woman wore." She was happier in the "shed" to which she returned to renew her life work.

There was a native excellence in Mine. Curie's character that impressed all who knew her. Her daughter's beautiful words are—"She was a soul in which neither fame nor adversity could change the exceptional purity," and she adds—"Slio was on that last day just as gentle, timid, and curious about all tilings as in her obscure beginnings." And with this, Einstein's testimony is in accord—"Madame Curie is of all celebrated beings .the only one whom fame has not corrupted.' She and her husband might have been enormously wealthy, but they declined to use their discoveries for personal gain. "It would be contrary to the scientific spirit," said Marie, and Pierre agreed. They took out no patent, published freely the results they obtained and made public their method of preparing radium. By such refusal of selfinterest the world is enriched scarcely less than by the far-reaching benefits which the labours of these noble people have brought to mankind.