234: Radioactive with Lauren Redniss

00:01:52:22 – 00:02:24:18
Dan LeFebvre
We’ll get into some of the details in the movie. But if we take a step back and look at the movie kind of from an overall perspective, if you were to give it a letter grade for historical accuracy, what would you say it would get?

00:02:25:15 – 00:02:58:22
Lauren Redniss
That’s such an interesting question because, of course, the movie is about real people and real events. At the same time, it’s not a documentary and it doesn’t purport to be. I don’t want to say it doesn’t purport to be accurate, but it is clearly interpretive, Right? And it has certain ways of flagging that with, you know, even by imagining conversations or emotions that could not have been or weren’t historically recorded.

00:02:59:07 – 00:03:14:10
Lauren Redniss
So I guess I’m hedging and not giving you a specific grade because I’m not sure that historical accuracy is the terms that the movie wants to be evaluated on.

00:03:15:01 – 00:03:35:21
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a that’s a very fair point. And I mean, yeah, it definitely happens where we don’t know what the conversations were. And so I know for a lot of movies that it’s where we know that this happened and we know that this happened, but we don’t know what connected in between the conversations that happened to connect those. And so you have to have some of that creative freedom to be able to fill in some of those gaps.

00:03:35:24 – 00:03:37:28
Dan LeFebvre
If you want to be able to show some of those conversations.

00:03:38:19 – 00:04:03:27
Lauren Redniss
Yeah, exactly. And I think I mean, one of the reasons that I was trying to write the book about the Curies is because there is a lot of historical information available there, a lot of letters, journals, diaries, books that Marie and Pierre did write, Many, many published, you know, published papers and essays. So we have a lot to work with, which establishes a very detailed historical record.

00:04:04:10 – 00:04:20:25
Lauren Redniss
But then it also, I think, allows for these artistic interpretations because if someone really wants, you know, this kind of straight up story of a record, they could go turn to those primary sources. But here also, we get the opportunity to speculate, as you imply, by, you know, filling in those gaps.

00:04:21:25 – 00:04:49:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yes. And it helps kind of make them feel more you get to connect with them a lot more on a personal level. And when you go through some of those conversations, I think definitely near the beginning of the movie, we are introduced to Marie in 1893 and we see her meeting Pierre Curie. But we’ll come back to that in a minute because we find out through some of the dialog there in the beginning with her sister Rona, that she goes by Marie now that she’s in Paris, but her name used to be Maria Sklodowska.

00:04:49:26 – 00:04:57:10
Dan LeFebvre
Can you share some historical context around what led Marie to move from Poland to Paris before the timeline of the movie even began?

00:04:58:04 – 00:05:28:22
Lauren Redniss
Sure. So Maria’s scout was born in Poland under Russian occupation. And her mother and her sister both died. One of her sisters died of tuberculosis before she was 11 years old. She went to, you know, as a as a teenager, went off to the countryside to work as a governess for a wealthy family. And she was always academically inclined and always very interested in science.

00:05:28:29 – 00:06:04:00
Lauren Redniss
She’s there stories about her kind of early brilliance where she taught herself to read apparently at the age of four. And no other other kind of academic or intellectual exploits. But when she was when she was working as a governess, she and Bronya, the sister that you mentioned, made a pact because in order to get an education out from under the thumb of the Russian occupiers and to end as girls to have the freedom to get a higher education, they would have to leave Poland.

00:06:04:08 – 00:06:21:18
Lauren Redniss
So they made an agreement that Maria would work to find Bronya as emigration to Paris, and then Bronya would establish herself in Paris and work to get Maria to be able to also move and to enroll at the Sorbonne.

00:06:22:24 – 00:06:41:15
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, wow. Okay. And that explains something that I guess I mean, we see it in the movie, but it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t show a lot of that beginning. They do really seem to have a very close connection as sisters and maybe even closer than some. I mean, if they’re working together like this to even move to a completely different country for a new life together.

00:06:42:06 – 00:06:48:06
Lauren Redniss
Yeah. Yeah. I think for a very close family, she seemed to have really, really good relationships with everyone in her family.

00:06:48:20 – 00:07:07:23
Dan LeFebvre
If we go back to the movie, it was in 1893 when Marie and Pierre run into each other and we see it happening quite literally in the film. They actually bump into each other on the street. Marie drops one of her books and then Pierre notices that it’s something about microbiology and that piques his interest. At first, Marie rushes away.

00:07:07:24 – 00:07:16:22
Dan LeFebvre
She doesn’t really seem interested in him. But then a little later, the two strike up a conversation. How well did the movie do showing how Pierre and Marie met?

00:07:17:16 – 00:07:22:08
Lauren Redniss
Well, that is a fictional meet cute that the movie invents.

00:07:22:22 – 00:07:23:10
Dan LeFebvre
That is for sure.

00:07:24:05 – 00:07:53:03
Lauren Redniss
Exactly. Yeah. In fact, what happened was they were introduced by a mutual friend, a Polish scientist. And so they the movie kind of separates and conflates different historical moments there. So they have a part about Marie looking for a new laboratory space. And actually, it was because she was looking for new laboratory space that she was introduced to Pierre Curie, who then invited her to come and share space in his lab.

00:07:54:04 – 00:07:56:28
Lauren Redniss
A street encounter like we see in the movie.

00:07:57:26 – 00:08:03:14
Dan LeFebvre
Literally bumping into each other. And I thought that might have been a little too convenient for.

00:08:05:05 – 00:08:06:11
Lauren Redniss
Microbiology.

00:08:06:11 – 00:08:29:03
Dan LeFebvre
But not always. Well, you mentioned that. And in the movie we do see that Marie losing her lab space at the university in Paris. And the way the movie kind of portrays this is it seems that people don’t really seem to be taking her very seriously there at the university. They kind of move her equipment around in the middle of the night for their own work, which then, of course, affects her ability to work.

00:08:29:12 – 00:08:46:10
Dan LeFebvre
And then when she complains about it, the guy in charge is the man in the movie named Professor Lipman. He just kicks her out of the lab completely. And since Marie is both Polish and a woman working in a male dominated scientific field in France, she just simply doesn’t seem to get a lot of respect from her peers.

00:08:46:20 – 00:08:52:09
Dan LeFebvre
Is that a good example of some of the challenges that Marie faced as a woman working in science in the late 1800s?

00:08:52:15 – 00:09:23:22
Lauren Redniss
Yeah, I think that’s a no. So I guess I’ll say it this way. No doubt she faced innumerable challenges as a foreigner and as a woman, I mean, clearly. But I don’t think there’s any historical evidence that Gabriel Lippmann, per say, was hostile to her the way he is portrayed in the movie. I think she attitude is kind of used as a proxy for challenges she must have faced, but isn’t specifically documented as like what actually happened.

00:09:24:00 – 00:09:50:08
Lauren Redniss
I think she felt squeezed in that laboratory space as she was seeking out other space. I don’t think he kicked her out. I think that, you know, Pierre himself as a white French man, so not in any of the demographics that were challenging to move or cause Marie to have additional obstacles in her path. He also faced a lot of kind of just from the establishment.

00:09:50:08 – 00:10:04:28
Lauren Redniss
And he wasn’t particularly boarded and he didn’t have a good lab. He didn’t have a professorship at that time. So I think there were challenges abounding. He wasn’t it wasn’t only that she was, you know, Polish and a woman.

00:10:05:26 – 00:10:06:21
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Okay.

00:10:07:02 – 00:10:09:20
Lauren Redniss
That’s certainly I’m sure that was added added to it.

00:10:09:21 – 00:10:30:19
Dan LeFebvre
But yeah, you mentioned some of that. Do we know, like maybe an example of one of the challenges that she might have faced that might have been different than something that Pierre might have faced since she was? And one of the impressions I got kind of from the movie was not only because she was a woman, but because she was not French, even though she changed her name to Marie, seems to kind of almost fit in.

00:10:30:19 – 00:10:36:14
Dan LeFebvre
I got the impression that she was trying to seem more French to to fit in a little bit more.

00:10:37:06 – 00:11:00:15
Lauren Redniss
Well, I mean, there are a number of specific examples that we can point to when in the movie doesn’t attempt to illustrate this. I think when they were awarded the Nobel Prize, in fact, that was awarded to Pierre. And he did have to write a letter and say, no, this was our work together and really, really obsessed that it wasn’t just in his name.

00:11:01:08 – 00:11:33:17
Lauren Redniss
And partly note that she was one of 23 women in a class of 1800. So there are very few women. And even once the couple was married and even once they were quite established, she was still carrying the burden of taking care of the children, rushing home to make lunch. So she still had a lot of the kind of traditional gender roles to juggle that, you know, Pierre, who, you know, I’m sure was also working very hard.

00:11:33:23 – 00:11:37:02
Lauren Redniss
But you know, she had that added kind of expectation.

00:11:38:00 – 00:11:59:04
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And there were some mentions in there that definitely that we see in the movie. One thing that you touched on there that I wanted to ask about is that the time that Marie does get kicked out of her lab, like we mentioned, but then Pierre offers her some space in his lab to work, and we start to actually see some of the work that Marie is doing.

00:11:59:04 – 00:12:20:16
Dan LeFebvre
And she kind of explains to Pierre that when she measures uranium, she discovers less radiation than she does in the other. In other words, she thinks that there might be an undiscovered element in there. And then that gets Pierre excited by this possibility. And he proposes a working partnership offering her something that he had worked on. They call it a quadrant electron emitter that he built to measure electrical charges in Mineral.

00:12:20:16 – 00:12:33:10
Dan LeFebvre
More precisely, it gets very scientific and way smarter than it could be. But does the movie do a pretty good job of showing this, how that how they worked started working together in a partnership?

00:12:33:28 – 00:13:00:18
Lauren Redniss
I think the partnership was so foundational to their attraction to each other, to any element of their relationship that to kind of postpaid, it would be maybe even to distort the kind of defining aspects of the relationship because one thing that that I write about in the book, and this is how Pierre had actually like sworn off romance, he had an early heartbreak.

00:13:00:18 – 00:13:24:22
Lauren Redniss
And he he was so driven as a scientist and he was had kind of decided that romance would be a distraction and there would be no room for romance in his life. And it was really only when he meets Marie that he says, Oh, wait, here is a woman who is my intellectual equal. Here is a woman who can actually support and help my scientific ambitions.

00:13:25:07 – 00:13:57:04
Lauren Redniss
And kind of in parallel to that with Marie, something that I learned actually after I published the book was when I was contacted by a relative of that family for whom she was a governess during her teenage years in Poland. This is like, you know, a story that’s never really been written about. But that family, she was a governess, smaller children, and they had an older son who was a math student who when he came back from university, he and Maria would ask, fell in love.

00:13:57:17 – 00:14:22:21
Lauren Redniss
And that family looked down on her because she was working class and they broke off the relationship. And that was another impetus for her to come to Paris. But what I learned from his descendants was that they kept in touch their entire lives and that even after she had become Madame Curie, the famous Nobel Prize winner, she still contacted him to talk about math problems and to discuss different equations.

00:14:22:28 – 00:14:41:28
Lauren Redniss
And so this kind of history and trajectory of intellectual partnerships is something that she had throughout her life from the time she was a teenager with Pierre and then in her relationship after Pierre. So I think for both of them, this was like a defining quality of what they sought in a partner.

00:14:42:17 – 00:15:02:28
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. I mean, really get the impression that it was work first. And that was that was, you know, very heavily focused on that. And then obviously other other things came afterwards. But it really seemed to be first not to get too far ahead of the timeline. So since we’re talking about that, we do see later on in the movie that the relationship does change.

00:15:03:12 – 00:15:24:06
Dan LeFebvre
And it just seems like it seems like they’re talking. And then I think they’re walking down the street and they just casually mention proposing and then take it back. Oh, we don’t really know each other that well. And then we see them getting married. It just seems like it was a very rushed into marriage, although it really does seem like they genuinely love each other.

00:15:24:15 – 00:15:30:03
Dan LeFebvre
Does the movie do a good job of showing how that transition from a working partnership into something more and they were married?

00:15:30:15 – 00:16:01:07
Lauren Redniss
I think it happened somewhat differently. In reality, we yeah, we do have a lot of letters back and forth between them and and also Marie’s letters to her sister at that time. And so we can see that he was really pursuing this idea of a relationship for quite some time. And she was resistant. But her resistance seems tied mainly to the idea that she was she had imagined she would return to Poland.

00:16:02:03 – 00:16:28:23
Lauren Redniss
And it’s really when he finally says, I’ll move to Poland for you, you know, that she’s like, okay, he loves me. I’m going to go for this. And so I think, you know, and she writes to her sister, she says, you know, what can I do? You know, I hate to give up pole. I’m paraphrasing, I hate to give up Poland, but we’ve become so attached to each other that we can’t bear the idea of being apart and and they’re married.

00:16:28:23 – 00:16:40:03
Lauren Redniss
So it’s about a year after they meet that they’re married. So I think it’s a reasonable amount of time for like, you know, the late 1800s courtship. So I think it does. I think it’s in reality wasn’t wasn’t rushed.

00:16:40:17 – 00:16:56:19
Dan LeFebvre
Did they? Do we know if then you mentioned she kind of wanted to go back to Poland. Was that always their plan with her, maybe even even and her sister as well, to go to France, but then eventually go back to Poland? Or maybe it was for that other guy that she kept writing to that she was governess for or something.

00:16:56:20 – 00:16:57:25
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know?

00:16:57:25 – 00:17:16:06
Lauren Redniss
I think that that relationship was really over by the time she was in Paris. But I think once she was like established at the Sorbonne and established and had to kind of built a relationship with Pierre, I think she knew that she was going to live in Paris. And then they sort of they started a family. His family was close by, in particular, his father.

00:17:16:06 – 00:17:29:15
Lauren Redniss
They they had a relationship with his family. So his brother was also a scientist. So I think she kind of built a life and in France and was she uses the word resigned, but I think she had kind of committed to to that let’s.

00:17:30:09 – 00:17:32:16
Dan LeFebvre
Work first and then she kind of resigns to a family.

00:17:33:18 – 00:17:38:17
Lauren Redniss
Right. I mean, resigned in the sense of, you know, of leaving her homeland.

00:17:39:01 – 00:17:51:14
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it sounds like that was when she left her homeland. That definitely wasn’t her family, wasn’t what she had planned on. It sounds like, you know, she had played on on work. And then life happens sometimes and plans change.

00:17:52:06 – 00:18:24:17
Lauren Redniss
Right. Right. And we don’t know. I mean, you know, she writes her her diaries are very colorful and vivid. She says, you know, my my mind is so alive with sleep plans that it feels a flame. You know, again, I’m paraphrasing, but she she really has a very passionate manner of expressing herself. So I think she may have been open to sort of all of the above when she moved to I don’t know that she was confining herself to laboratory, you know, even in her imagination.

00:18:24:29 – 00:18:45:04
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah. That’s fascinating. If we do go back to the movie, there’s it doesn’t really go really deep into the technicalities of what the two are working on because it is more focused on the people, I think, than than the science in a lot of cases. But there is an explanation that Marie and Peter have. They’re having dinner with one of the scientists in their lab, Paul and his wife Jean.

00:18:45:26 – 00:19:06:12
Dan LeFebvre
And as it explains in the movie, they say that they take pitchblende or they crush it down, they boil it, they add acidic alkaline solutions to remove all the substances until only that which is pure remains. And I think she asks. Sorry, Paul’s wife. Ask Marie why? Why are you even looking at uranium? And she mentions the name Becquerel.

00:19:06:27 – 00:19:29:21
Dan LeFebvre
And then later we find out that it takes around like four tons, like a lot of pitchblende to extract a very tiny pinprick of this new element that they discovered radium. And then they mention another new element, polonium and Marie points out that even they thought atoms were finite and stable. They aren’t, and some of them emit rays and their instability happens.

00:19:29:21 – 00:19:51:04
Dan LeFebvre
And then that’s something she decided to call radioactivity. So I know there’s a lot more science in there. We have to get into all the scientific aspect of it. But just that general explanation of how the movie explains how they discovered radium and polonium, is that a pretty good explanation of how Marie calls it in the movie Radioactivity she came up with that was discovered?

00:19:51:04 – 00:20:12:03
Lauren Redniss
Yeah, it is. I mean, I think basically, as you mention that Carol had he was a scientist who was working at the Natural History Museum. There, and he was working with uranium. He left his uranium on a photographic plate overnight in a closed church. And when he returned, the photographic plate had the appearance of having been exposed to brilliant light.

00:20:12:04 – 00:20:37:13
Lauren Redniss
He was like, Oh, that’s curious. There was no light. And so he publishes that, but he doesn’t really pursue it. So what Marie decides to do is test basically every rock she can find to see if she can reproduce these findings in such a small test as she just writes likely. So she just tests zillions of different sample specimens.

00:20:37:20 – 00:21:00:00
Lauren Redniss
And one of these specimens is what you call Glen, which is the waste product of mining. The in this case was from these ceramic mines in Bohemia, southern Bohemia. This is where she sees that result. You go this ineffable, something strange is happening here. And so as you say there, there was pitchblende was seen as a waste product.

00:21:00:00 – 00:21:26:03
Lauren Redniss
It wasn’t seen to have any value. So they just imported these 400 tons of rubble. And and you mentioned earlier like, you know, what were some of the obstacles she faces? WOMAN You know, I’ve heard some scholars say that she took on this kind of physical task with the backbreaking work of pulverizing by hand this, you know, these mountains of rubble, in part to prove that she’s a woman.

00:21:26:03 – 00:21:52:09
Lauren Redniss
She can do this. She can do the hardest, most physical, most demanding part of this labor that took four years. And that is, you know, so, so grueling. So, yes, it gets to that other that other point. But I think that, yeah, basically, she just we’re over time and with all this backbreaking labor they distill down into this it’s tiny you know 10th of a gram of radium and radium, of course, is that’s a name that they coined together based on the Latin word for rays.

00:21:52:09 – 00:21:55:25
Lauren Redniss
And polonium is named for Poland for her homeland.

00:21:56:14 – 00:22:16:22
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, well, okay. Yeah. I don’t even think they mentioned that that part in the movie for that. I mean that’s fascinating that going through all these different rocks and then they ended up going with something that was a waste product. It’s almost like, okay, we literally went through all the rocks. Now what’s next? Waste product? That’s all. I’m sure it wasn’t like that, but.

00:22:17:23 – 00:22:32:05
Lauren Redniss
Well, I think it makes sense, right? Because it was like a proportion of the radioactive matter was so tiny. It’s like that. It didn’t exist in like a kind of concentrated form independent of this other kind of matrix.

00:22:33:17 – 00:22:58:00
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, that’s I mean, just it’s hard for my mind is small, but it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the amount of material that it takes to make something so tiny. And then just the mere fact that they could find that like in the entire world and they can find that from it. Yeah, it’s mind boggling.

00:22:58:23 – 00:23:11:14
Lauren Redniss
Exactly. And I think the thing that fascinates me is the leap of imagination. It took to to say, I think we’re going to find this. We’re going to spend the next four years determining if we’re right or not.

00:23:12:18 – 00:23:22:16
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And it’s I mean, there’s it’s not there’s no like, okay, this is the path we take to get there, right? You expend for anything. I mean, no, if, if you go in the right direction or not.

00:23:23:12 – 00:23:28:27
Lauren Redniss
And you think about all the times that scientists are probably wrong, but you have to do that work to do to for the times that you’re going to be right.

00:23:29:20 – 00:23:53:17
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie. The scientific community does seem to embrace this discovery right away. And then in 1903, Marie and Pierre win the Nobel Prize for it. And although, as you mentioned earlier, Pierre had to insist that Marie’s name was added to the Nobel, I know a lot of times movies kind of compress timelines, change timelines around. Is that a pretty accurate depiction of what happened in that timeline?

00:23:54:11 – 00:24:12:22
Lauren Redniss
Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think it was it was undeniable the significance of this discovery. And, you know, it’s like something that that was part of a series of discoveries. Right. You you see the history with Becquerel. You see William Röntgen making the X-ray. So you see this kind of community of scientists who are building on each other’s work.

00:24:13:05 – 00:24:22:03
Lauren Redniss
And so I think it’s immediately recognized the significance of what the Curies have achieved. And yeah, there’s there’s no downplaying it.

00:24:22:19 – 00:24:44:17
Dan LeFebvre
I guess it kind of goes back to what we were talking about. I mean, you know, it’s not going to be just one person necessarily that does everything they’re building on other discoveries and things like that and kind of building on until somebody actually finds it in the movie after they win the Nobel Prize. It seems like more than just the scientific community embraces the discovery of radium.

00:24:44:17 – 00:25:08:02
Dan LeFebvre
We see things like radioactive cigarets, radioactive toothpaste. There’s beauty powder. They use radium as a cure for baldness. There’s even a dermatologist, Henry Douglas. He in the movie, he mentioned something about a significant shrinkage in the cancer tumor, and he was excited by this possibility of radium being a cure for cancer. I think it’s a letter that was mentioned, I think he’s actually portraying in the movie saying that.

00:25:08:02 – 00:25:23:28
Dan LeFebvre
But I get the impression that there’s after this discovery, people thought radium was this cure all, everything from baldness to cancer. It’s a beauty products, toothpaste. Was is there any truth to that that people just thought there was this magical cure all for almost everything?

00:25:24:17 – 00:25:50:06
Lauren Redniss
Yes. That I think every product, other packaging design that they show on screen, I think those are all real. Is that I mean, you I remember in my book like I could it narrowing down that list was such a fun challenge because it’s such a colorful list of fraud. I mean, literally radium, condoms, radium, suppositories, radium, chocolates. I mean, the list goes on and on and on.

00:25:50:11 – 00:26:16:26
Lauren Redniss
And the number of diseases that was said to cure for is basically anything that you’ve ever heard of is included. And it’s interesting, though, in terms of the kind of leap of thinking that is made about radium. Addressing cancer, Pierre actually took a tiny vial of radium and placed it on his arm. This is depict it kind of hinted at along with the other story you mentioned in the movie.

00:26:17:11 – 00:26:43:14
Lauren Redniss
He gets this kind of lesion on his arm from the radium and they make the inference that if radium can kill disease tissue excuse me, kill healthy tissue, perhaps it could also kill disease tissue. And they, the Curies, start doing experiments on animals to see if it’s out of those experiments that they start doing the Curie therapy or the the radium treatment for cancer.

00:26:44:06 – 00:26:47:06
Lauren Redniss
Oh, wow. Which is still called cryotherapy therapy in French now.

00:26:47:08 – 00:27:04:15
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. So there was I mean, at least for that for the cancer side, did they do anything with with any of the other stuff? Was that pretty much just marketers trying to, I guess I should say? Were the carriers involved in any of the scientific side of any of these other products? We not see any that in the movie necessarily just seems.

00:27:04:29 – 00:27:09:15
Dan LeFebvre
I got the impression it was all this new thing. We can make some money off of it.

00:27:09:15 – 00:27:31:28
Lauren Redniss
Well, the funny thing is I bet the vast majority of those products had no radium in them. I mean, radium was so difficult to get at that point. I mean, it was is insanely costly. And I mean, you know what we just talked about, right? It took four years to get a 10th of a gram like this is not something that’s just in every product that, you know, a face cream that you could that you could buy.

00:27:32:06 – 00:27:50:20
Lauren Redniss
But but it was definitely marketed that way. And I think it’s sometimes I am conscious of it because I see like that the latest scientific kind of veneer that’s applied to whatever makeup products or whatever. And I think this is a human inclination, right? We always want the magic cure.

00:27:51:18 – 00:28:11:05
Dan LeFebvre
That’s exactly what I was thinking as I was watching the movie. I was like, okay, we know now, obviously these are not good things. You don’t want radio. I mean everything. Yeah, but it kind of makes me think, well, what what is out there now that is seen as, like, this magic cure all and you know that we won’t know about until much later.

00:28:11:27 – 00:28:29:14
Lauren Redniss
Right? And like radium it as it turns out, like when, when it did become, you know, sufficiently mass produced to be able to be in various products. Right. You have the radium watch girls. Right. So there too, radium was used as a kind of glow in the dark material, particularly during World War One, for four dials that were used at night.

00:28:29:26 – 00:28:57:00
Lauren Redniss
And you had these women in New Jersey using very, very fine brushes, which they licked to get a fine point. And then they were painting the watch dials had the faces of the watches would glow at night, and some of those girls were glowing from the waist up because they ingested so much radium. And of course, that the company actually had a secret, what they called the Doom book, which is the list of fatalities of of the women who were working in the factory.

00:28:57:12 – 00:29:03:14
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, wow. So not only that, but they were covering up what was actually happening when they started to realize what was going on.

00:29:04:00 – 00:29:06:23
Lauren Redniss
Exactly, which resulted in the first class action lawsuit.

00:29:07:22 – 00:29:12:14
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Of course, none of that’s none of that trade movie.

00:29:12:14 – 00:29:13:09
Lauren Redniss
But that’s a tangent.

00:29:13:11 – 00:29:37:20
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that’s no, that’s. That’s fast. That’s fascinating to me because it’s radium is dangerous. But yeah, I didn’t even think about the fact there in the movie that what the process we just talked about took so much to get that that yeah, there probably really wasn’t anything in there but by the time it was then it would make sense that they already had these products that would be marketed as a cure all that like, Oh, now that we can actually mass produce this stuff better, let’s actually great, maybe it is cure all.

00:29:37:22 – 00:29:56:18
Dan LeFebvre
And yes, but speaking of some the tragedies there, there is a tragedy that we see in the movie and it happens. While Perez is walking to the street one rainy night, he’s been coughing a lot leading up to this scene, but no one has really connected it to their work yet. And he’s walking along kind of rainy night.

00:29:56:18 – 00:30:08:19
Dan LeFebvre
He kind of has this really bad coughing fit. So much so he’s so violent that he kind of stumbles into the street and then he’s hit by a horse drawn carriage and killed. How did the movie do showing how Pierre Curie died?

00:30:09:06 – 00:30:29:12
Lauren Redniss
I mean, that’s the gist of it. You know, he was he was walking in Paris on this drizzly night and was hit. I mean, we don’t know. The precise cause was it linked to the weakness caused by exposure to radioactivity? That’s that’s more speculative. But. But the gist. That’s the gist. That’s how he was killed.

00:30:29:12 – 00:30:35:16
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. I mean, I mean, speculative. It seems like a fair conclusion, at least for a movie. It doesn’t have to be entirely accurate. Yeah.

00:30:35:20 – 00:30:40:10
Lauren Redniss
Yeah. And that’s definitely something that I talk about in the book as well. In the possibility of that connection.

00:30:41:20 – 00:31:04:15
Dan LeFebvre
With that connection, because we see Pierre coughing a lot, but then we also see Marie coughing a lot even after his death. And obviously they’re exposed at work. You know, they’re working with what we now know are very dangerous elements. But in the movie we even see them like sleeping with vials of radium at home. They seem to be just consistently exposing themselves to these elements, both not only at work but also at home.

00:31:04:26 – 00:31:07:01
Dan LeFebvre
Is that really true that they did that at home? Oh.

00:31:07:24 – 00:31:33:21
Lauren Redniss
Yeah. Apparently. I mean, they were so entranced. It was I mean, can you imagine? This is is absolutely beautiful kind of magical substance. Marie described being in the lab at night, is being surrounded by fairy lights. And so she did. She apparently kept a small a small vial by her bedside. And it’s really interesting because this is a moment in history when electric lighting was becoming the norm.

00:31:34:02 – 00:31:59:22
Lauren Redniss
And apparently electric lighting of this period was so harsh, was so brilliant and so white, and I think so alarming to many people who had grown up and lived with candlelight. That kind of softness and gentleness of candlelight. And so when radium began to make its appearance on the scene, some people thought, oh, maybe this is the solution to our lighting problem.

00:31:59:28 – 00:32:10:03
Lauren Redniss
We can avoid this, the horrors of electric light and actually paint our rooms with radium and so now that was speculated for a while.

00:32:10:19 – 00:32:12:22
Dan LeFebvre
And if it falls off in a pure baldness, too.

00:32:13:19 – 00:32:18:25
Lauren Redniss
Perfect. Exactly. There was something marketed called Undark paint, which is made with radium.

00:32:19:03 – 00:32:38:23
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, wow. Oh, I mean, almost like we have black light today, right? I mean, you kind of think that glowy effects, we’re still trying to get it in a safer way. Wow. That’s that’s that’s fascinating. That and I mean, it it almost makes sense. I mean, I didn’t even think about that because you do see, it’s, you know, it’s glowing and it’s it’s different.

00:32:38:24 – 00:32:53:01
Dan LeFebvre
I even think about, you know, the fact that electric lighting was would not have been as common for most people, not that most people would have had radium either. But, you know, just this idea of it being something brand new and it’s it is magical looking. I mean, it is.

00:32:53:07 – 00:32:53:27
Lauren Redniss
Definitely.

00:32:54:07 – 00:33:16:17
Dan LeFebvre
Back in the movie we see after Pierre passes away, we see Marie and Paul start having an affair. Obviously, Paul’s wife doesn’t like this. He releases some rather private letters between Marie and Paul into the newspapers. And then we start we start to see people protesting outside Marie’s home. They call her some terrible names. They demand that she goes back to Poland, know go back home.

00:33:17:00 – 00:33:52:03
Dan LeFebvre
And around the same time, there are some reports of radiation starting to cause illnesses. We don’t really know the full extent of it yet. People don’t know the full extent. But the general opinion of radium kind of seems to be changing here. And so the impression that I got was that this public perception of Marie drastically changed, almost like in this world course after his death, where there’s this affair that’s being made public in the papers, and then there’s people that are starting to link some health complications to radiation.

00:33:52:16 – 00:34:00:10
Dan LeFebvre
Is the movie correct to suggest that these were reasons why this public perception of Marie Curie changed?

00:34:00:29 – 00:34:23:25
Lauren Redniss
I never read the linkage in that way. I think the reaction to her relationship with Paul LaChapelle was extraordinarily negative, and she was characterized in all the ways you described with a lot of xenophobia. This came on the heels of the Dreyfus Affair. Even though she wasn’t Jewish, she was called all kinds of anti-Semitic things and characterized that way.

00:34:24:07 – 00:34:33:09
Lauren Redniss
But I don’t know that the scholarship supports a connection with the dangers of radiation playing into that.

00:34:33:18 – 00:34:35:13
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, so those are two separate things.

00:34:35:13 – 00:34:44:12
Lauren Redniss
That, yeah, I think thematically it you know, that you had to have that twist in the story works for the movie. But I don’t I don’t know the historical record supports that.

00:34:44:12 – 00:34:50:20
Dan LeFebvre
Sure. Yeah, sure. I mean, I mean, in a movie you’re going to have this, you know, this climax there that that happens with that.

00:34:50:25 – 00:34:51:07
Lauren Redniss
Right.

00:34:51:21 – 00:35:14:04
Dan LeFebvre
Where they’re actually protests and things like that. I mean, the movie seems to imply that it wasn’t just something that was something that she was reading about. But like I mean, it seemed like there were people with signs picketing outside her home, like it just seemed like a constant thing. It just had to have in the movie. In the movie, she seems to try to not let it bother her, but I don’t know how you could not let it bother you.

00:35:14:09 – 00:35:15:29
Dan LeFebvre
Was there any truth to that, that kind of thing?

00:35:16:17 – 00:35:45:18
Lauren Redniss
I think it definitely bothered her. She did leave Paris and she traveled under an assumed name. And then did she actually went to England and stayed with a mathematician friend of hers. And so, yeah, she she basically got out of Dodge and I think it was quite uncomfortable. It was a real international scandal and that I think the the turning point for her came when World War Two started and people were sufficiently distracted to not engage in those of Teddy petty gossipy stories anymore.

00:35:45:22 – 00:35:52:03
Lauren Redniss
And because she was so heroic in World War One, I say World War two, I might well go on.

00:35:52:03 – 00:35:55:15
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And which made me want to get Simon.

00:35:56:08 – 00:36:03:26
Lauren Redniss
Yeah, right. So when the war started, that that changed the conversation, but, but it was deeply uncomfortable for her. Yeah, the time.

00:36:04:22 – 00:36:12:03
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So did it affect her? I mean, had to have affected her work then at that point too, was, did that change a lot?

00:36:12:03 – 00:36:33:10
Lauren Redniss
Yeah, Well it was there was a confluence of events in this kind of extraordinary and unprecedented way, which was, you know, she was the first woman to have won a Nobel Prize. And then in to that is 2011, 1911, really scrambling her. In 1911, she’s awarded a second Nobel Prize. So no one has won two Nobel prizes at this point in history.

00:36:33:20 – 00:36:53:20
Lauren Redniss
And certainly a woman to win two different two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She won physics and chemistry. So here she is, like one of history’s most celebrated scientists. Just at that moment is when the scandal breaks. And so the Swedish Academy actually writes to her and says, you know, maybe it’s better if you don’t come. Maybe you should just turn down this prize.

00:36:53:21 – 00:37:14:15
Lauren Redniss
Spare us all the embarrassment and of all people, she supported by Albert Einstein, among others. But, you know, some people kind of step to her defense. And and she, again, to her credit, is stoic. And she says, you know, this is nonsense. My work is being recognized and my private life has nothing to do with the value of my work.

00:37:14:15 – 00:37:17:10
Lauren Redniss
And I’ll be in Sweden to accept that Nobel Prize. Thank you very much.

00:37:19:01 – 00:37:34:27
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, get on her. It sounds like what you’re saying there almost and very similar to a line that we saw earlier in the movie, even when I guess it would end. Actually, no, I think I’m getting my time those bits up. I think it was actually after after Peter passed away, they offered her his position at the university.

00:37:34:27 – 00:37:51:00
Dan LeFebvre
And in the movie she has a line of something where like my work speech where I fought for itself, you know, I’m not here to try to prove to you anything. My work speaks for itself. And she just kind of left it at that. So, you know, she knew how smart she was. She knew that she what she had accomplished.

00:37:51:16 – 00:38:00:26
Lauren Redniss
So, yeah, I think that’s a really bittersweet moment. Right. She becomes the first woman professor in the history, 650 year history of the Sorbonne. But it’s only because her husband died.

00:38:01:13 – 00:38:20:01
Dan LeFebvre
Was she trying to become a professor or was I mean, I know it happened because her husband husband died, but, I mean, she could have obviously, if she if she wanted to. She was definitely smart enough. I mean, do you think she was actually was that something she wanted to do or was it purely because of her husband passing?

00:38:20:21 – 00:38:51:17
Lauren Redniss
I mean, I don’t specifically remember reading anything about her pursuing that ambition, so I can’t speak to that specifically. I imagine that, you know, if she had been a man, it would have been automatic. So it may have been something that she chose not to focus on because she didn’t think that it was going to happen. But I mean, I think her research life was extremely fulfilling.

00:38:51:24 – 00:39:07:10
Lauren Redniss
So I don’t know that she felt like there was a missing piece that she was actively pursuing. But I think it’s like, you know, that’s a natural part of intellectual life and scientific research. So I guess I guess, I don’t know. It’s like know.

00:39:07:10 – 00:39:26:22
Dan LeFebvre
That’s right. And I mean, and she she had enough on her plate. I’m sure you’re talking about all this, actually, all the manual labor and everything on that, too, that the stuff that we don’t see in the movie, you know, the behind the scenes stuff, the actual, you know, heavy, heavy work, manual labor and everything. Yeah, I’d say she had enough on her plate.

00:39:26:22 – 00:39:27:00
Lauren Redniss
Yeah.

00:39:27:23 – 00:39:51:00
Dan LeFebvre
We haven’t talked a lot about Mary and Peter’s two daughters, but near the end of the movie we see the older of them. I would pronounce it Irene, but in the movie they pronounce it red. They convince she convinces her mother to take up a new fight. As you mentioned, with World War One, it’s raging and soldiers just having their limbs amputated for things as simple as a sprained ankle, according to the movie.

00:39:51:07 – 00:40:09:26
Dan LeFebvre
And then Marie takes up this new cause and she uses her connections even even offers to melt down her Nobel Prizes for the gold to help fund the X-ray machines and ambulances that she needs to save lives. And then we see in the movie the mother daughter team working together. They’re working in mobile radiography units on the battlefields.

00:40:10:02 – 00:40:26:29
Dan LeFebvre
And there’s techs at the very end of the movie that says over a million men were x rayed by the units, saving countless lives. Is it true that her daughter was the one to convince Marie to find a way to use her influence in scientific connections and all that and her science itself to save lives during World War One?

00:40:28:06 – 00:40:51:06
Lauren Redniss
I don’t believe it was a Iran who had that idea. I think it was Marie. They did work together in Iran, you know, who’s just a teenager, and she was out there on the battlefield and trained as a X-ray technician. And she was doing that work for sure. But I don’t believe there’s any source for her having the initial idea.

00:40:51:24 – 00:41:14:05
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So a little bit of creative license there. But how about the effectiveness of that was was against the concept of it? Would the movie be right, say like, okay, they’re amputating to one of the extreme examples I think they gave in the movie was a sprained ankle and so they cut off the leg. Was that something that was real, that was happening, that her units were able to help with.

00:41:15:15 – 00:41:48:11
Lauren Redniss
The sprained ankle? I idea I’m not sure they were definitely. So basically the idea was that you had soldiers getting injured in the battlefield and by the time that they could be transported far away to a hospital, they could have lost so much blood or so much time that those injuries would become fatal. These and whereas if you could bring a mobile X-ray unit, bring the medical care to the soldiers on the battlefield, they could get that care that much faster.

00:41:48:19 – 00:42:08:06
Lauren Redniss
And so you would avoid, for instance, if a bullet was lodged in a soldier’s leg, but it wouldn’t be visible on the surface. You would instead of having like some wild exploratory exploratory surgery where the doctors basically working blind, you take an X-ray, you see exactly where it is and you pull it out. You don’t have to, as you say, amputate the leg.

00:42:08:12 – 00:42:28:27
Lauren Redniss
So sprained ankle, I’m not sure that seems a little drastic because I would think, you know, you’re not going to mistake a sprained ankle for an invasive injury like a bullet. But they definitely use those mobile X-ray units extremely effectively to, you know, for for much better targeted treatment.

00:42:29:21 – 00:42:44:12
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, that makes sense. And the distance was something I didn’t think about, too, because by the time they get to the hospital, you know, if they don’t if they can’t get the bullet out for, you know, digging around blind, then yeah, it could lead to much, much worse infection and then you might have to amputate at that point.

00:42:44:21 – 00:43:03:15
Dan LeFebvre
I mentioned some of the kind of the impressions that I got while I was watching the movie. But one thing about movies is everybody can walk out of a movie where they completely different impression of the exact same movie. And movie adaptations always change things from the book, but let’s say someone’s listening to this and they’ve only seen the movie.

00:43:03:24 – 00:43:15:13
Dan LeFebvre
That’s all that they know about. Very Curious Life. What’s something that you really wish they would walk away from the movie knowing about your curious life and about the true history they came through in the story.

00:43:15:28 – 00:43:20:20
Lauren Redniss
For me, doing my research is, I mean, or from the movie or through my own.

00:43:22:03 – 00:43:38:18
Dan LeFebvre
Kind of kind of a mixture of both. So, I mean, like with with the movie, you know, assuming a lot of people have only seen the movie and they haven’t read your book yet. Yeah. What’s something from her story that you hope came through that people would walk away with, that they would know that would help encourage them to to want to learn more?

00:43:39:04 – 00:44:09:07
Lauren Redniss
Yeah. I mean, I think some of her innovations speak to her ability to kind of take you just step back and to use her imagination to make beats, intellectual leaps, which allowed her to make discoveries, for instance. So we’ve talked about her laboratory research, we’ve talked about her work in the battlefield. That’s actually pretty unusual for the period that someone would be doing this.

00:44:09:11 – 00:44:29:18
Lauren Redniss
What you know, what might be called pure science in the lab, but then thinking about how it could be applied, thinking about what real world implications it has. And one of the things that the Curies did was put their situate their lab when they, you know, later on in their life when they could build their own lab right next to a hospital and collaborate with medical doctors.

00:44:29:18 – 00:44:52:28
Lauren Redniss
So that was really innovative for the time. And another thing they did was not see their science removed from the world in terms of ethics. And you see that a little bit in the movie with the quotes when Pierre makes his Nobel speech in 1903 and he talks about the potential applications for weaponry, which of course we see nuclear weapons.

00:44:53:11 – 00:45:20:26
Lauren Redniss
So I think and another thing we can talk about with Marie in World War One is that she was really instrumental in setting up the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations. And the Curies were pacifists, and they saw the potential of their discoveries could be used, and they wanted to work for peace. And like implied and we talked about the products they didn’t patent radium, didn’t seek to profit from radium.

00:45:21:03 – 00:45:52:06
Lauren Redniss
They saw their discoveries as a universal good. And so I think that the way that they straddle the world of research and and not separating the world of science, medicine and ethics is really something quite beautiful. And I think that one of the things that drew me to the subject to write this book in the first place was the kind of duality that we see in each of these instances, the potential for good and the potential for harm, right?

00:45:52:06 – 00:46:15:26
Lauren Redniss
We see it with the cancer treatments. We see that radiation can cause cancer, it can cure cancer. We see that radium can be used for so much good for nuclear energy in ways that could spare us fossil fuel contamination. But it can also cause nuclear catastrophe. It can be used in ways that advanced civilization and also be used to destroy civilization.

00:46:15:27 – 00:46:35:24
Lauren Redniss
Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all of these other kind of looming but catastrophic uses of nuclear warfare. So I think that duality is really, really fascinating in that tension. And I think the Curies story, their love story, embodies this in a really compelling way.

00:46:36:16 – 00:46:55:15
Dan LeFebvre
That’s yeah, that’s fascinating. I love how you said that. With the contrast between the two and you mentioned your book. You have a fantastic book is called Radioactive Marie and Pierre Curie A Tale of Love and Fallout. Not to say I love. It’s not a typical history book. It’s not you know, think of a history book that’s black and white text on us.

00:46:55:19 – 00:47:14:14
Dan LeFebvre
You know, I’m just paper, but it’s a it’s like it’s colorful. It’s a colorful combination of history and art. So before I let you go, can you share something about the Curies? Maybe surprised you while you were researching and writing your book, as well as where someone who wants to learn more about the true story can get their own copy of it?

00:47:15:11 – 00:47:47:00
Lauren Redniss
Yeah, well, I mean, I think I’ve touched on some of the kind of things I’ve discovered, like, you know, Marie’s early romance and one thing that’s really, really fascinating is that I was fortunate enough to interview the Curies granddaughter, the daughter of Iran, and Helen Giulio Curie. And in fact, Helen is married to the grandson of Paul Shaffer.

00:47:47:00 – 00:48:12:27
Lauren Redniss
And so this kind of third generation and it’s it’s just another thing we didn’t even touch on is that Iran and her husband, Frederic Trudeau, also won the Nobel Prize decades for their work on radioactivity. And so actually, Helen was just extraordinary when I interviewed her, I think, because basically everyone in her family has won the Nobel Prize.

00:48:13:16 – 00:48:32:17
Lauren Redniss
So because she you know, she’s this incredibly accomplished physicist, she was like, well, some people only do small things. Some people do big things. Some people only do small things. I was like, that’s your standard. You have to win the Nobel Prize to be, you know, like this. But she is just extraordinary. And yeah, so so this legacy continues.

00:48:33:00 – 00:48:43:24
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. That’s that’s fascinating. Yeah. No pressure. Winning the prize. Well, thank you again so much for your time to come on to chat about radioactive.

00:48:44:17 – 00:48:55:10
Lauren Redniss
Oh, thank you so much for having me.