The Science of Writing

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST DAVA SOBEL TALKS ABOUT TRAILBLAZER MARIE CURIE

By Anastasia Stanmeyer

Dava Sobel (Glen Allsop for Hodinkee)

THIS YEAR'S theme for The Mount’s Summer Author Series is trailblazers, highlighting the stories of groundbreaking visionaries—scientists, activists, thought leaders, and artists who have broken barriers and reshaped the world. On August 4 and 5, Pulitzer Prize finalist Dava Sobel talks about The Elements of Marie Curie (Grove Atlantic, 2024). Sobel was a science writer for The New York Times before turning to writing books. She was born and raised in New York, growing up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Gardens and attending the Bronx High School of Science. She was a freelancer for a variety of magazines until the publication of Longitude in 1995. She has continued to write books (and a play), enjoying the process of researching as much as the published product. Her books also include Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, And the Sun Stood Still, and The Glass Universe. She has co-authored six books and edits the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American. In a recent conversation, Sobel discusses Marie Curie’s life and achievements, including her fight for recognition and her significant contributions during World War I, as well encouraging a generation of women who worked in her laboratory. Sobel also shares her journey as a science writer and her process of balancing scientific accuracy with engaging storytelling.

Stanmeyer: You call Polish-born French physicist Marie Curie a “trailblazer,” but I consider you a trailblazer, too. 

Sobel: I honestly have not thought of myself that way. I think of myself as lucky and in the right place at the right time. Marie Curie is a real trailblazer, because she had to fight for what she did. She had to go to another country because she couldn't even attend university where she lived. And then she constantly had to fight to be recognized as a scientist because she was a woman. I didn't encounter any sort of obstacle, which is part of why it took me so long to get around to the issue of women in science. Honestly, and to my embarrassment, for the longest time, I didn't realize it was an issue. It was only while writing The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars that I finally got smart.

1927 Solvay Conference on Quantum Mechanics attended by 29 physicists, luminaries like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger (Benjamin Couprie). The conference was pivotal in the history of physics. Held at the Institut International de Physique Solvay in Brussels, Belgium, it brought together leading physicists to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory.

Stanmeyer: What opened your eyes to this?

Sobel: I chose the topic because it’s a really good story known in the astronomy community, but not known outside of it. In looking at what these women actually did—it was spectacular—I kept having this annoying sense of surprise that a woman had done those things. I had to admit that I had my own negative attitudes about women, which I was not aware of.

Stanmeyer: Why did you have those negative attitudes? 

Sobel: I grew up in the 1950s, and although my family never put any obstacle in my way, I was awash in cultural attitudes. Women were not scientists, I thought, even though my own mother had an advanced degree in chemistry and briefly went back to work when I was in elementary school. Those attitudes are pervasive and negative and dangerous. Right after I noticed that in myself, I found it in other women. There was a professor of astronomy at Harvard who had agreed to be one of my expert readers. I always like to have many people read the book in manuscript and try to catch mistakes. She sent me a note that said, “Sorry, I'm really not paying attention to your astrophysics because I'm gobsmacked by these women. Here I am at Harvard, I know all their names, I know the story, but somehow I always thought they were doing something cute or quaint. It never struck me that they were actually doing science.” So there it was again. Even people who knew the story—and a woman who's a scientist herself—still had the sense that somehow these things couldn't have been done by women. It's insidious. It's like a latent disease. You don't even know that you have those attitudes until something happens that makes you admit it.

Stanmeyer: Did that put the fire under you to do something about it?

Sobel: I thought, well, now I'm really interested in women in science stories. So, my editor immediately suggested Madame Curie, and I said, “No, I don't want to write about her. She's too famous.” I was looking at a woman named Dorothea Klumpke Roberts. I reviewed a book called Women in Their Element, which was a collection of essays about women chemists and, of course, Madame Curie was one of the profiles, and her daughter was another. But then there were at least half a dozen others mentioned that had some formative period in Curie’s laboratory, and that got me, because there were so many! Then I found out through the Curie Museum how many women actually passed through there. There were 45! This is something nobody knows about her. Some of them did really important things. So, that's how the book came about.

Stanmeyer: You write in the opening of your portrait of Marie Curie that even now, she remains the only female scientist most people can name. Why do you think that is?

From top, Marie Curie in her Paris Laboratory, 1912. Marie Curie, 1903 (public domain, 2)

Sobel: Well, to be fair, most people can't name even one scientist. Most people have a sense that scientists aren't real people because they don't meet them. Scientists are a tiny portion of the population, so they have no direct experience. And science is frightening to a lot of people—it’s too complicated, too much math, whatever the reason is, they don't like it. It's not comfortable. So, they don't know much about it. Then, if they've heard anything, they've heard of Albert Einstein, and they've heard of Madame Curie. But I think people who are at all interested also have heard of Rosalind Franklin or Vera Rubin or Jennifer Doudna. Madame Curie wasn’t the first woman scientist, and she was never the only one. But you have to want to go there. She has a unique staying power as a role model and a source of inspiration, beyond any other character I can think of in or out of science. She seems like an impossible model to follow, and somehow she works. Her name is magic.

Stanmeyer: Is that the reason that you wanted to write about her because she is so widely known?

Sobel: I wanted to write about her because I had something new to say. Nobody knew about these 45 women. And what do most people “know” about Madame Curie? They think she was French, first of all, which she wasn't. They know she won the Nobel Prize, but they may not know that she won two Nobel Prizes, and that she remains the only person who's ever won both Physics and Chemistry. But they had a sense that she did something great, that it was important, and that there was something poignant about her life. And they may think it was freakish that even though she was a woman, she achieved greatness.

Stanmeyer: And you wanted to tell the story behind all of that?

Sobel: Yes, and it’s such a female story. She goes through pregnancy, she has a miscarriage, she has two daughters, and then she's a widow and is raising these two girls by herself. There's a lot there, beyond the physics and chemistry.

Stanmeyer: How did you do your research?

Sobel: Because she is who she is; everything she touched has been digitized. You can read her lab notebooks. You can even read her handwritten grief journal. Everything is online through the French National Library System, and I had to rely on that, because when I started the research of this book, the pandemic lockdown happened. I couldn't travel. And then there were librarians at places where the papers of these women were held. There was actually a librarian who was willing to hold a document camera over some letters to let me read them in real time. That’s how cooperative people can be. 

Stanmeyer: Then, of course, there was the challenge of researching all the other women scientists you wrote about. 

Sobel: Yes, it was a challenge, because a lot of them really left only traces. The Curie Museum has the only records for most of them. Two of them actually had biographies written about them. So, I had those pieces and those authors to talk to. I looked at what the scientists themselves had written in the published scientific literature. It was mostly in French. Then it was just coming to my own understanding of the material, because it's a lot of physics and chemistry that isn't really part of the astronomy that I've spent decades studying. I put myself back to school and tried to understand it as they understood it at a time when even the atom wasn't accepted as a model of how matter is constructed. Nobody knew for sure that there were such things, let alone that they had subatomic parts. All of that came to light because of radioactivity. 

Stanmeyer: So you went back to school? 

Sobel: Well, I say that metaphorically. I had a fantastic high school experience at The Bronx High School of Science. I took an elective in analytical chemistry, so it was back there somewhere, and a lot of it did come back, and then I just did a lot of reading. 

Stanmeyer: You’ve mentioned that you like to find the human story within the science. 

Sobel: I like to emphasize that the scientists really are human. It may sound weird to keep stressing that, but they're often presented as something just a couple of degrees above robot. 

Stanmeyer: How do you balance presenting the accurate scientific details with making the narrative engaging for a non-expert like me? 

Sobel: Well, I'm usually thinking of somebody—not the general public but somebody I know—reading this book and trying to digest it. I have to come to my own understanding, and then I have to tell the story with that understanding.

Pierre and Marie Curie in front of their house in Sceaux, France, in 1895 (public domain)

Stanmeyer: That’s interesting that you say that. In reading The Elements of Marie Curie, you do provide scientific information, but I find that to be fascinating and something that I can understand because you're not sounding jargony.

Sobel: There’s no jargon. It’s not dense. There’s a glossary. Whatever I can think of to make it clearer. It's shaping the story that is the biggest challenge—how to tell the story so that it is compelling and doesn't skip over science.

Stanmeyer: Can you share an example of something that you discovered during your research that you know particularly surprised or moved you?

Sobel: I think the biggest surprise was Madame Curie’s participation in the First World War. Imagine, she's a tiny little woman, and her first thought is, “I'm going to outfit a van with X-ray equipment and get as close to the front as I can.” I mean, who thinks like that?

[During World War I in France, Curie and her daughter Irène played a vital role in bringing X-ray technology closer to wounded soldiers on the battlefield by developing and equipping vans with an X-ray machine and photographic darkroom equipment. These vehicles, known as "petites Curies,” allowed doctors to more accurately locate bullets, shrapnel, and broken bones within injured soldiers, improving surgical outcomes and saving countless lives.]

Stanmeyer: Incredible. Yet, the way that you describe her, she's just this unassuming yet captivating person.

Sobel: Shy in public, but with tremendous will. I think the line that really breaks my heart every time I read it is in the grief journal, where she's actually talking to Pierre. [Her husband, Pierre, was a French physicist, radiochemist, and a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity, and radioactivity who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie and Henri Becquerel. He died in 1906 in Paris when he slipped and fell while crossing a busy road in the rain and was run over by a heavy horse-drawn cart.] After she was offered the teaching position and the directorship of the lab, she says that she doesn't know if this was the right thing to do. “Sometimes I think it's the only way that I'll be able to live, and other times I think I must have been mad to accept it.” She perfectly expresses her situation. The other thing is, at the beginning of the war, just before the mobilization, she was in Paris and her daughters were in Brittany, and she wrote them a letter about how she wants them to stay calm and be brave. She’ll try to get to them, she says. “If war doesn't break out, I'll come tomorrow. If it does, we'll do this.” So, you get the tension of the situation. At the end, she says, “You and I, we shall try to make ourselves useful.” That was another major resource: two volumes of correspondence with her daughters, which is published. So I had those as books, also in French.

Stanmeyer: Besides being a science reporter for The New York Times prior to writing books, you also became involved in Scientific America?

Sobel: Yes, I edit a poetry column.

Stanmeyer: How does poetry have a place in a scientific journal, and why did you become involved in that?

Sobel: I have been interested in poetry about science since the ’70s, when I met Diane Ackerman, who writes poetry about science. She and I are the best of friends. Years ago, we wanted to make an anthology of poetry about science, but it never came to be. When I discovered that Scientific America had once published poetry, I thought to approach them about reinstating poetry in the magazine. To my great surprise, they agreed. It was luck and timing, because they were redesigning the format and were about to enter the 175th anniversary year. They wanted a new feature, and this was it. I scrambled at first, and I went right to Diane. She wrote the first poem that was published in January 2020, and then as soon as it started appearing in the magazine, I didn't have to go looking for poets. They came to me. I just hope the magazine continues the column because I have enough for the next five years of issues. 

Stanmeyer:Why do you think poetry is a good idea in a scientific publication?

Sobel: It's important for scientists to know about poetry and poets to know about science. I've had two Nobel Prize scientists contribute poems that have appeared in the magazine, one a physicist and the other a chemist. The chemist is really a poet and has written poetry all his life. The physicist is new to poetry. Doing Nobel Prize-worthy physics wasn't enough for him. He had to write about it in a poem.

Stanmeyer: Do a number of scientists write poetry?

Sobel: Yes, or they’re really good writers. Somebody like Carl Sagan could write things that would reach and touch a vast population. There are others, too. I remember hearing Stephen Jay Gould say that he used to have his students read Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and they always asked if was there a separate edition for the scientists because it’s so readable. And that’s just it. It's really well-written. 

Stanmeyer: How do you choose the subjects that you write about?

Sobel: One thing has led to another. Galileo worked on the longitude problem, and while I was reading about what he had done, I discovered the daughters, and that was a real shocker. Galileo had daughters who were nuns. I was at a library that was only about information related to time and time keeping. There was this book called The Pulse of Time, and it was all about Galileo's work on longitude and clock making. The author was Silvio Bedini, who was still living then. I had wonderful correspondence with him. He included his own translation of one of the older daughter's letters. She had written to her father about the clock at the convent. I still remember sitting in that library, reading that letter, and just falling off the chair. I was trying to picture her situation, being a nun, being a daughter of Galileo, being charged by the other nuns with fixing this clock. The whole thing was so fantastic.

Stanmeyer: That’s incredible.

Sobel: I wanted to see if I could find out anything else about her. The first thing I found out was that all her letters—or all the ones that survived—had been published with his complete works and were even a freestanding edition in Italy. My agent was going to Italy on vacation, and I said, “See if you can find this book for me.” Sure enough, he brought it back. I had taken Italian in college for no good reason. That took some doing to get the language because I was 30 years rusty. But I had three years at university level, so I could read. And there was a retired Italian professor in my town who was teaching conversational Italian at the high school. I asked her to be a consultant on the project. So, she would read my translations and comment on them, and she had things like the Italian version of the Oxford English Dictionary, because a lot of the words were 17th century terminology. They ate a lot of game birds that showed up in the letters, and you just couldn't find those words in an English-Italian dictionary.

Stanmeyer: Your talk on August 4 and 5 will be at The Mount, which was Edith Wharton’s home. Are you looking forward to that?

Sobel: Oh, I love her. She had a whole life, didn't she? I love so much about her. I love her secret generosity to Henry James. I love her writing. The Glass Universe is divided into three parts, and there are two quotes on each of those divider pages. One is from a famous woman writer from that period, and the other is from a woman scientist. The quote I used from Edith Wharton is “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” That was so perfect because telescopes use mirrors.

Stanmeyer: What advice would you offer to aspiring science writers who want to make complex scientific ideas accessible to a wider audience?

Sobel: I think my idea that I was talking about earlier is good advice. I have taught science writings, and what I tell students is to think about an audience of one and to try to tell your story or explain your scientific concept to that person, because that answers a lot of questions. How much do you need to explain? How far down you have to go? Do you have to tell them what an atom is? Or did they already know that? If it's one person, it clarifies a lot, and it calms the writer down. You want to connect with your reader, and it's hard to connect with a vast multitude, but you can connect with one. I wrote Longitude for my mother. I knew she would love the story. She learned navigation herself, but she hadn't known the history. I was thinking of her the whole time. n

On August 4 and 5, Dava Sobel presents The Elements of Marie Curie as part of The Mount’s Summer Author Series. For tickets and more information, go to edithwharton.org.