Marie Curie: “Be Less Curious About People, More About Ideas”

In May 1920 the American journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney, editor of the women's magazine The Delineator, talked her way into Curie's laboratory in Paris. She expected a celebrity and found a woman in a black dress who would not talk about herself. Every time the conversation turned personal Curie turned it back to the work. Meloney printed the answer she kept getting: in science we should be interested in things, not persons.

Meloney was not put off. She learned that the discoverer of radium did not own a gram of it, raised a hundred thousand dollars from American women, and in May 1921 brought Curie to the White House to receive a gram from President Harding. Curie hated the tour, the dinners and the questions about her private life, and endured them for the radium. When Macmillan published her short biography of Pierre in 1923, Meloney wrote the introduction and put the line in it.

Curie herself gave the principle to Pierre. In the same book she writes that he held that in science one should be interested in things and not in persons, and Quote Investigator, which traced the line, concludes that the couple shared it. Her daughter Ève called it her mother's motto in the 1937 biography. It was a rule Curie needed: in 1911, the year of her second Nobel Prize, the Paris papers turned her friendship with Paul Langevin into a scandal, and the Nobel committee suggested she stay home from the ceremony. She went to Stockholm anyway.

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas” is the same thought, smoothed for a poster, and it first turns up in print in 1972. It sits naturally beside another curiosity line that was given to the wrong person, “the cure for boredom is curiosity”, and beside Rosalind Franklin's letter on why science and life belong together. For Curie's own working pages, still too radioactive to handle without protection, read about her notebooks.

Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, then in the Russian Empire, the youngest of five children of two teachers. Women could not attend university there, so she studied at the clandestine Flying University and worked as a governess to pay for her sister's medical studies in Paris, then followed her in 1891. She took degrees in physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne and in 1895 married Pierre Curie.

Investigating the rays Henri Becquerel had found in uranium, she coined the word radioactivity and in 1898, with Pierre, discovered polonium and radium. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Becquerel, became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne after Pierre's death in 1906, and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences. In the First World War she equipped mobile X-ray units and drove them to the front. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by her long exposure to radiation.