Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. When Marie Kerrey and her husband Pierre won the Nobel Prize for Physics in nineteen o three, their older daughter Iranne was just six years old and their younger daughter ev was yet unborn. Little could they have imagined that their extended family would go on to hold more Nobel Prizes than any other. It all started
with the romance and collaboration between Marie and Pierre. They met in eighteen ninety four when she, at twenty seven years old, took a job in Pierre's lab. He was then a thirty five year old physicists studying crystals and magnetism, and they quickly fell in love. The next year they were married. Though Pierre was several years her senior, it
was Marie who steered their work into radiation. For her doctoral thesis, she began building on the work of Henri Bakrel and German physicist Wilhelm Runtgun, who had recently discovered X rays. Marie eventually hypothesized that the mysterious penetrating rays were a property of a given elements atoms. Pierre shelved
his work with crystals. To help Marie further her discoveries, they set out to measure the strength of the rays by adapting an instrument Pierre developed studying an or containing uranium. Marie noted that it emitted much more radiation than one would expect from the element alone. While investigating the source of the rays, they discovered two new radioactive elements, radium and polonium, which Marine named for Poland, the country of
her birth. Polonium was four hundred times more radioactive than uranium. The pair were deeply devoted to their work and to one another, yet just three years after they won their Nobel Prize, their collaboration ended tragically when Pierre was run over by a horse drawn cart. Marie was devastated, but we spoke via email with Shelley Emling, author of Marie Curie and Her Daughters, The Private Lives of Cy his
first family. She said, from all accounts, Marie loved her husband deeply and was overwhelmed with grief, so much so that she refused to talk about Pierre. However, she eventually published a biography of Pierre in ninety three. In it, Murray wrote, it is impossible for me to express the profoundness and importance of the crisis brought into my life by the loss of the one who had been my closest companion and best friend. Crushed by the blow, I
did not feel able to face the future. I could not forget, however, what my husband used to sometimes say, that, even deprived of him, I ought to continue my work. And continue she did, even though her very presence in
the field was somewhat controversial. Marie was the first woman to receive a PhD in France, the first female professor at the Saban, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, the first person to win more than one Nobel Prize and to this day the only woman to win more than once, and the first person to win a Nobel
in more than one scientific field. And not everyone of the time thought Marie deserved to share the scientific stage with her male colleagues, so in nineteen o three, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marie and her husband for their study of radiation, as well as to Beckrell for his observation of spontaneous radiation in uranium. But originally the members of the French Academy of Sciences nominated
only Pierre and Beckrell for the prize. Marie was included only after Pierre worked to persuade some of the Nobel committee that his wife deserved to share the honor to and at the awards ceremony, the president of the Swedish Academy downplayed her contributions, quoting the Bible in his speech, it is not good that man should be alone. I
will make a help meet for him. Eight years later, in nineteen eleven, Marie was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of her discovery of radium and polonium and her subsequent research into nature of those elements. In that time, there was pushback from people who believed she was receiving the prize for essentially the same work and thus that she didn't deserve it. But whatever anyone thought about it, those Nobel prizes made the
reserved Marie a celebrity. But we also spoke with Naomi Passakoff, author of Marie Curry and the Science of Radioactivity. She said she was a renowned scientist at a time when there were virtually no women in the field. She was a heroine. She was an oddity in some ways. She was famous for being famous. In Marie and her two daughters set off across the Atlantic Ocean on their first journey to America, where Marie was mobbed by fans and
given a queen's welcome. In New York, Marie was hosted at the Waldorf Astoria Carnegie Hall in the American Museum of Natural History, which hosted an exhibit dedicated to her discovery of radium. Universities conferred honorary degrees on her, and President Warren G. Harding held an event in her honor at White House. Em Ling said, until that time, her
daughters had no idea that their mother was famous. Marie was nothing if not humble, But everywhere they went in America they were greeted by throngs of reporters and flashing cameras. People wanted Marie's autograph. The girls were stunned, as was Marie. Speaking of her family, Marie was determined not to give up her scientific work after the birth of her daughters, em Ling said, But although she was relentless in her
scientific pursuits, she was also devoted to her daughters. It's true that she wasn't able to spend an inordinate amount of time with her children, which meant Marie's father in law and others often cared for them, but she did lead by example. Em Ling added that she was especially involved in their upbringing. After Pierre's death, Marie enrolled her girls in a cooperative school in which the parents took turns teaching the children lessons in their areas of expertise.
Marie taught physical sciences. As the years went on, Wren took her father's place as Marie's colleague. During World War One, when Iren was a teenager, she assisted her mother in bringing X rays to the battlefront to treat wounded soldiers. Iran worked alongside her mother running mobile X ray units in field hospitals and specially outfitted vehicles, which the soldiers dubbed petit curies. Passakoff said Marie felt so confident in her daughter's knowledge and abilities that she had Irene give
courses in radiation to soldiers and nurses. This was even before Wren had earned her university degree. Later, Iran became her mother's assistant at the Radium Institute while completing her studies. It's there that a Wren met engineer Frederic Jolo, a trainee in Marie's lab, whom she married in nine In ninety four, the couple made an important discovery when they figured out a way to artificially create radioactive adams in
the lab. It earned them a shared Nobel in Chemistry the following year, making Irene and her parents the only mother daughter and father daughter pairs ever to receive the prize. Though like her mother, Iran eventually died of prolonged exposure to radiation. But what about Marie's other daughter Ev. Rather than follow her parents into the sciences, Ev found success as a writer. Perhaps her best known work was Madame Curie, a biography of her mother that she wrote after Marie
died in nineteen thirty four. The book became a huge bestseller and earned EV literary acclaim. Emling said. During World War Two, Ev became a foreign correspondent, traveling tens of thousands of miles to wartime fronts that included Iran, Iraq, India, China, Burma, and North Africa. Ev went on to publish a second best selling book about her experiences, this one called Journey
among Warriors. Emling said. When V arrived for a book tour in the United States, where her smiling face graced the cover of Time magazine In February of nineteen forty, she was greeted as a celebrity. She gave lectures and had dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt. After the war, Ev turned to humanitarian work. In nineteen fifty two, she was appointed Special Adviser to the first Secretary General of NATO. In nineteen fifty four, she married an American diplomat, Henry Richardson Labouise,
who later became the executive director of UNISEEF. EV would also travel extensively for UNI SEF, and in nineteen sixty five, when UNISF was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it was Labuis who accepted the honor on the organization's behalf, making him the fifth person in the Curis extended family to receive the prize. Ev would die in two thousand seven at the age of a d two, and the distinguished
scientific tradition of the Curie family still lives on. Ellen Lazenzolio, the daughter of Irene and Frederic, is a well respected nuclear physicist in France, and Ellen's husband, Michel Lazene is also a nuclear physicist, and their son is an astro physicist. Today's episode was written by Jennifery Marquees and produced by Tyler Clang. I've been meaning to do this episode for a while, but wanted to air it today because Radium is the subject of the first episode of a new
podcast that I'm narrating. It's called American Shadows and premieres today. It's produced by Aaron Minki and his team at Grimm and Mild along with I Heart Radio, and it's an exploration of the dark, true stories from America's past. It gets into some disturbing territory, but if you like lore or unobscured, I hope you'll give it a try. That's American Shadows, available wherever fine podcasts are found. Brain Stuff
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.