There may come a day when I don’t shamelessly start reading a book at Barnes & Noble–devoid of any intention of purchasing said book–while waiting for my bus back to campus, but last Saturday was not that day.
~Dr. Harvard Lyman, professor of BIO 310: Cell Biology, speaking about the true nature of the mitochondria and misconceptions taught about the organelle throughout traditional schooling
“And why do you think I have made this thing?” he demanded abruptly. “Dreaming to leave footprints on the sands of time?” He laughed one of those horrible mocking laughs. “Not at all. To get it patented, to make money from it, to revel in piggishness with all might while other men do the work. That’s my purpose. Also, I have enjoyed working it out.”
“The creative joy,” I murmured.
“I guess that’s what it ought to be called. Which is another way of expressing the joy of life in that it is alive, the triumph of movement over matter, of the quick over the dead, the pride of the yeast because it is yeast and crawls.”
I threw up my hands with helpless disapproval of his inveterate materialism and went about making the bed. He continued copying lines and figures upon the transparent scale. It was a task requiring the utmost nicety and precision, and I could not but admire the way he tempered his strength to the fineness and delicacy of the need.
When I had finished the bed, I caught myself looking at him in a fascinated sort of way. He was certainly a handsome man–beatiful in the masculine sense. And again, with never-failing wonder, I remarked the total lack of viciousness, or wickedness, or sinfulness, in his face. And by this I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is that it was the face of a man who either did nothing contrary to the dictates of his conscience, or who had no consicence. I am inclined to the latter way of accounting for it.
….
And so I caught myself standing idly and studying him. I cannot say how greatly the man had come to interest me. Who was he? What was he?How had he happened to be? All powers seemed his, all potentialities,–why, then, was he no more than the obscure master of a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for frightful brutality amongst the men who hunted seals?
My curiosity burst from me in a flood of speech.
I recently finished a biography of Madame Curie written by Barbara Goldsmith that I picked up in the Strand in Manhattan. Madame Curie was a Polish born scientist made famous for her discovery of radium and radioactivity during her time in France. While we expect scientists of Marie Curie’s caliber to have sacrificed endless hours for their field of study, Marie’s life was characterized by stoic discipline punctuated by periods of profound depression and isolation.
As a child, she lived in a Poland crushed under the heel of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. After a Polish uprising in 1863, her father lost his position as a Professor of Chemistry and Physics due to his nationality. The Polish language was forbidden in schools as was the teaching of Polish language and literature. When Marie was only four, her mother began to succumb to tuberculosis. As such, she was never allowed to physically contact her mother in any way. Seven years later, her mother and an older sister had both fallen to tuberculosis. After years of self-education, Marie and her sister, Bronya, managed to fulfill their academic dreams in Paris. She enrolled as one of the twenty-three women out of nearly two thousand students at the University of Paris in order to study Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. She lived in an unheated apartment, subsisting on little but tea, bread, chocolate, and fruit. Despite her physical frailness, she was so focused on her studies that when another student advised her to make soup she dismissed his suggestion because she did not know how to make soup and refused to give up her time in order to learn the skill.
When another scientist by the name of Henri Becquerel, her husband Pierre, and Marie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their work with radiation, the committee grudgingly included Marie based on her gender. While Becquerel and Pierre were appropriately addressed as ‘Professor’, Marie was simply ‘Madame’. However, she continued her work (as the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize) and later won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.
Pierre Curie kept this photograph of Marie Curie on his person at all times – he referred to the photograph as ‘the good little student’