Glowing Reviews
with Marie Curie

My Lab Notebook Is Literally Radioactive (Not a Metaphor)

Marie opens the series by addressing the elephant in the room: her personal notebooks are still so radioactive that they're kept in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and you need to sign a liability waiver to read them. She walks listeners through a typical day in her lab, which involved zero ventilation, no gloves, and carrying test tubes of radium in her coat pockets. "I thought the glowing was charming," she admits. "In my defense, literally nobody knew what radiation was. I was the one figuring it out."

Guest: Pierre Curie (co-host, episodes 1-7)

Two Nobel Prizes and They Still Didn't Give Me a Lab

A deep dive into the absurdity of winning the Nobel Prize in Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) while being denied membership in the French Academy of Sciences because she was a woman. Marie reads actual rejection letters aloud with increasingly sarcastic commentary. Pierre chimes in to confirm that yes, the committee initially wanted to give him sole credit for their joint research. "I love my husband," Marie says, "but if he had accepted that prize without me, I would have discovered a new element and named it Divorce-ium."

Guest: The Ghost of the Nobel Committee Chairman

Radium: It's in My Skincare, My Watch, and My Bones

Marie discusses the radium craze of the early 1900s with a mixture of horror and reluctant pride. Radium toothpaste. Radium chocolate. Radium suppositories (yes, really). Radium-infused water marketed as a health drink. "I discovered an element," she says, "and humanity immediately decided to put it in everything they could swallow." She reviews actual vintage radium products with star ratings. The radium condom gets zero stars. The Tho-Radia face cream gets one star "for ambition."

Guest: Eben Byers (the man who drank radium water until his jaw fell off)

Women in STEM: A 1903 Perspective (Spoiler: It's Bad)

Marie takes listeners through the experience of being the only woman in every room she entered for approximately forty years. The time a professor told her she should study home economics. The time a newspaper described her Nobel Prize by focusing on what she was wearing. The time the Sorbonne wouldn't let her lecture because the students "might be distracted." "Distracted by what?" she asks. "My devastating understanding of atomic mass? My threatening knowledge of polonium?" She names every male colleague who took credit for her work, alphabetically.

Guest: Lise Meitner (commiseration session)

Pierre and Me: A Love Story Told in Research Papers

The love episode. Marie and Pierre discuss how they met (in a physics lab, obviously), their courtship (which consisted mostly of discussing crystallography), and their wedding (she wore a dark blue dress she could also use in the lab). "Pierre proposed by offering me lab space," Marie recalls. "It was the most romantic thing anyone has ever done." Pierre confirms he considered a ring but decided a new electrometer would be more practical. They agree this was the correct decision. Their joint publications are described as "the love letters of two people who would rather measure becquerels than write sonnets."

Guest: No guest — just Marie and Pierre being adorable

Isolating Radium: 4 Years, 8 Tons of Pitchblende, 1 Gram

Marie details the absolutely insane process of isolating radium. She and Pierre processed eight tons of pitchblende ore by hand in a converted shed with a leaky roof. Boiling, filtering, crystallizing, stirring enormous vats of acid for four years straight. The yield: one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride. "People ask me about work-life balance," she says. "I will answer that question as soon as I finish stirring this cauldron of uranium residue." She calculates that she stirred enough pitchblende to fill a swimming pool.

Guest: André Debierne (lab assistant, chief vat-stirrer)

The Sorbonne Won't Hire Me So I Guess I'll Change Physics

Marie discusses her early career struggles with a level of pettiness that can only come from being proven catastrophically right. She was rejected from multiple positions, told to go back to Poland, and informed that women couldn't handle the rigors of advanced physics. She responds by discovering two elements, winning two Nobel Prizes, and becoming the first female professor at the Sorbonne. "The best revenge," she notes, "is publishing in a peer-reviewed journal."

Guest: Henri Becquerel (who shared her first Nobel and did maybe 10% of the work)

Mobile X-Ray Units: How I Became a War Hero with a Van

During World War I, Marie designed mobile X-ray units — nicknamed "petites Curies" — and drove them to the front lines herself. She taught herself to drive. She taught herself radiology. She trained 150 women as X-ray operators. She personally X-rayed wounded soldiers near the trenches. "They gave medals to men for shooting guns," she says. "I saved lives with a modified Renault truck and they said 'thank you, now please go home.'" She estimates the mobile units helped treat over a million wounded soldiers.

Guest: Irène Curie (daughter, who helped at age 17)

The Press Called Me a Home-Wrecker (I Was Doing Science)

Marie addresses the Paul Langevin scandal head-on. After Pierre's death, the French press launched a vicious campaign against her for an alleged affair with physicist Paul Langevin. She was called a "foreign home-wrecker" and a mob gathered outside her house. Meanwhile, every male scientist in Paris was having affairs and nobody cared. "I won my second Nobel Prize during this scandal," she notes. "The Nobel Committee told me not to come accept it in person because of the 'controversy.' I went anyway. I gave my lecture. I went home. I continued doing science."

Guest: Albert Einstein (who wrote her a supportive letter, read on air)

I Named an Element After My Country and That's the Most Polish Thing Ever

Marie discusses naming polonium after Poland, which at the time didn't exist as an independent nation. "They partitioned my country," she says. "So I partitioned an atom and named what I found after it. This is how a physicist does patriotism." She goes on a lengthy tangent about Polish food, her childhood in Warsaw, and the fact that she had to go to Paris because Polish universities wouldn't admit women. The episode ends with her teaching the listener how to properly pronounce Skłodowska.

Guest: Bronisława Dłuska (sister, fellow revolutionary)

My Daughter Also Won a Nobel Prize (You're Welcome, Genetics)

Marie discusses her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. "People say I'm competitive," Marie says. "I am not competitive. I simply raised my children in a laboratory and they turned out to be geniuses. This is called good parenting." She also discusses her other daughter, Ève, who became a journalist and author. "Ève is the only person in our family who never won a Nobel Prize," Marie says. "We try not to mention it at dinner." (Ève's husband later won one, making her the only non-laureate in the entire family.)

Guest: Irène Joliot-Curie (Nobel laureate, daughter, lab partner)

Season Finale: My Legacy Glows (Literally and Figuratively)

Marie reflects on her life, her discoveries, and the fact that her body was so radioactive when she died that her coffin is lined with lead. She is buried in the Panthéon in Paris — the first woman interred there on her own merits. "They put me next to Voltaire and Rousseau," she says. "Neither of them discovered an element. I discovered two. But sure, we're equals." She closes with advice: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Except radium. Fear radium a little bit. I should have feared radium more."

Guest: All previous guests (roundtable)

GlowRight Nightlights

"Tired of stumbling in the dark? GlowRight nightlights illuminate your hallway without any of the bone-marrow destruction! Unlike Marie's original radium nightlights, ours use LEDs and won't require a Geiger counter. Use code HALFLIFE for 20% off."

Marie's note: "In my day, I WAS the nightlight. My lab coat glowed. My hands glowed. I was a human lantern and I thought this was fine."

SafetyFirst Lab Equipment Co.

"Goggles. Gloves. Lead aprons. Ventilation hoods. All the things Marie Curie never used. SafetyFirst: Because your research shouldn't outlive you. Literally."

Marie's note: "I feel personally attacked by this advertisement, and I endorse it completely."

Pitchblende Premium Skincare (DISCONTINUED)

"Our original formula contained authentic radium for that signature Curie glow. After several lawsuits and one FDA investigation, we now use vitamin C. The results are less luminous but significantly more legal."

Marie's note: "I am not responsible for what capitalism did with my discoveries."

Groundbreaking. We almost didn't let her accept in person. In retrospect, the fact that we debated whether to let the greatest scientist of her generation walk onto our stage because she was a woman is... not our finest moment. The podcast is excellent. She is still intimidating.

My wife is the most brilliant person I have ever met, and I say this as someone who was also a Nobel laureate. She is also the only person who has ever made me laugh during a crystallography lecture. I am biased. I do not care. Five stars.

Solid science content. Lost a star because she still won't admit that my model of the atom was more elegant than hers. But her episode on isolating radium made me feel lazy, and I split the atom.

We have reviewed this podcast and find it to be of high quality. We are, however, unable to admit it to our collection because it was produced by a woman. We understand this makes us look ridiculous. We stand by our decision. [Editor's note: They reversed this policy in 1979.]

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK. This podcast made me go off constantly. I need a vacation.