On 1 November 1929, Marie Curie spent her evening at the Plaza Hotel in New York. In her only public appearance in the city, she was scheduled as the guest of honor to address the third annual dinner of the American Society for the Control of Cancer. Feeling ill throughout most of her trip, she was able only to thank the audience of physicians. Robert G. Mead, a member of the society’s finance committee, read her speech, which was broadcast nationally on radio. Curie’s text focused on, as the New York Times put it, the “perils in radium” despite its use as a cancer treatment.
By the time of her visit, Curie knew all too well about those perils. She had already suffered from double cataracts and had gone through four operations to restore her eyesight. She had pernicious aplastic anemia. Her fingers were severely burned from carelessly handling radioactive materials with her bare hands as she prepared secondary radium standards.
Many of us are familiar with Curie’s radiation-induced health problems and the narrative that they resulted from her neglect, or at least her ignorance, of the risks. The story goes that she failed to take precautions while working in the laboratory because she was a devoted scientist who was concerned about others but not herself. In short, the mythical profile of the two-time winner of the Nobel Prize has been built on a foundation of selflessness and altruism. Although Curie certainly possessed those qualities, she was also among the first to establish radiation protection measures in the lab and to raise concerns about the use of radium in medicine by unqualified people.
By the late 1920s major radiological societies in the US were growing concerned about the effects of radiation exposures. In 1929, alarmed by the stream of deaths among laboratory and industrial workers who handled radioactive materials, the societies joined forces to establish the Advisory Committee on X-Ray and Radium Protection. In February of that year, Harrison Martland, the examining physician of Essex County, New Jersey, published an extended report documenting the clinical effects of radium poisoning in painters of luminous watch dials, who licked their brushes to a fine point. It was the first time an industrial use of radium in the US was put under serious investigation.
When the press asked Curie about her opinion, she made clear that the French experience was different. She was right: French radium workers used small, cotton-tipped sticks instead of paintbrushes, so no licking was involved. Still, Curie made clear that it is “imperative to change the method of using radium.” Four years earlier, in collaboration with the French National Academy of Medicine, she had pushed for the use of lead screens and periodic blood tests for those working in the radium industry.
Utterly aware of radium’s extraordinary powers but also its perils—as much as the knowledge of her times allowed—Curie regulated her own laboratory first. She suggested that researchers have blood tests regularly and that they exercise and get fresh air. With those protections in place, she worked closely with Claudius Regaud, the director of the Pasteur laboratory of her Radium Institute in Paris, who developed innovative radiotherapy methods to treat cancer. That work enforced her firm position that radium should be used only by trained, experienced, and certified personnel in research institutes like hers. “I particularly would stress the fact that radium is dangerous in untrained hands,” read the text of her 1929 New York speech.
For some elite US physicians of the early 20th century, most of whom had been trained in Europe, Curie’s suggestions and methods made perfect sense. The future of medicine would be shaped in the laboratory. Many other American doctors, however, were trained in a professional culture that valued practice over laboratory-based knowledge. Too often they were unable to distinguish between the latest scientific therapeutics and proprietary patent medicine featured in American daily newspapers. In striking contrast to the European radium situation, US clinical investigations were coupled with industrial research on radium’s properties and in-house, laboratory-based medicine, paving the way for the monopolization of medical radium by American industrialists. Physicians, both academics and private practitioners, had to depend on resources and expertise from the private, corporate sector. Hence, for receptive American ears, Curie’s brief speech was a strong and important plea for radium regulations and the adoption of radiation protection measures in the medical sector.
Less than five years after her US visit, Curie died from aplastic anemia at age 66. Radiation exposure likely took years off her life, yet her efforts helped prevent the same from happening to others.
Maria Rentetzi is an associate professor of history and sociology of science and technology at the National Technical University of Athens. She studies the history of nuclear sciences with an emphasis on radioactivity and radiation protection. She is the author of Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna (Columbia University Press, 2007).
