At Mme. Curie’s Lab

In addition to being the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne and the only person ever to have won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, Marie Curie welcomed other women into her lab. It was her lab from the untimely death of her husband, Pierre, in 1906, till her own death in 1934. She ran it, enlarged it, moved it into the imposing new Radium Institute, and peopled it with an international assembly of scientists, more than forty of whom were women, including her daughter Irène, the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Dava Sobel is a former reporter for the New York Times and the author of Longitude, Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, The Glass Universe, and, most recently, The Elements of Marie Curie. She initiated and edits the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American.

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