-沟通
Unit 4 Force of Nature
Barbara Goldsmith
1.
While I was a teenager
growing up in New Rochelle, New York, I had up on
my bulletin board
a
photo
of
Marie
Curie
sitting
under
an
elm
tree,
her
arms
wrapped
around
her
daughters,
two-year-old Eve
and nine-year-old Irene. I didn't know very much
about Curie beyond the basics:
She
and
her
husband
had
discovered
radioactivity.
She
was
the
first
person
to
win
two
Nobel
prizes.
She was brilliant, single-minded, a legend. I was
just a girl with little direction, more drawn
to words and made-up stories than to
formulas and lab experiments.
2.
Looking back, I think I admired that
photo so much, not because of Marie Curie and what
she stood for but because she seemed so
exotic
—
or maybe
because of how her arms encircled
her
girls.
My
own
mother
lay
in
the
hospital,
recovering
from
a
grave
injury
in
a
car
crash.
I
wanted her to hold me, but
she couldn't. So, instead, I idolized Marie, who
in my mind became
the strongest and
most capable woman in the world.
3.
Like any girl's fantasy, mine contained
at least a shred of truth. Marie Curie's own
daughters
grew into accomplished women
in their own right, though their mother was
obsessively engaged
in her research
before they were born. Curie was what we might
today call a super-competent
multi-
tasker: Her work revolutionized the study of
atomic energy and radioactivity, and she's one
of a pitiful few female scientists whom
schoolchildren ever study. Also she was a woman
driven
by passions, fighting battles
much of her life with what a doctor now would
probably diagnose as
severe
depression.
In
the
end,
her
most
brilliant
discovery
proved
fatal
for
both
her
and
her
husband.
4.
When
Curie was 10 years old, in 1878, her mother died
of tuberculosis. The Polish girl then
known as Manya Sklodowska carried on
with her schoolwork as if nothing had happened,
but for
months she'd find places to
hide so she could cry her eyes out.
5.
At age 18, she landed a job as
governess to a wealthy family near Warsaw. She
wound up
falling in love with Casimir
Zorawski, an accomplished student of 19 with whom
she shared a love
of
nature
and
science.
But
when
Casimir
announced
that
he
and
Manya
wanted
to
marry,
his
father
threatened
to
disinherit
him.
She
was
beneath
his
station,
poor,
a
common
nursemaid.
Definitely no. Four years dragged by.
Finally, Manya told Casimir,
decide for
you.
meager savings and took a train to
Paris, where she changed her name, enrolled at the
Sorbonne
—
and
walked into history.
6.
In
1893, she became the first woman to earn a degree
in physics at
the Sorbonne. If you
have
ever
seen
the
1943
film
Madame
Curie,
you
know
the
broad
brush
strokes
of
her
early
experiments to find a mysterious,
hidden new element. There's a scene in which
actress Greer
Garson, as Marie, stirs a
boiling vat, her face glistening with sweat. Late
at night, Marie and her
husband,
Pierre, enter the lab to see a tiny luminous stain
congealed in a dish.
it
be?
—
radium!
7.
The
reality
was
a
lot
grittier
—
and
a
lot
less
romantic.
Marie
and
Pierre,
whom
she
married
in 1895, did indeed work side by side late into
the night. But their lab was so shabby and
dank that their daughter Irene, at age
three, called it
scientist said that
had he not seen the worktable, he would have
thought he was in a stable.
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