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On the Discovery of Radium Famous Speech by Marie Curie
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On the Discovery of Radium Famous Speech by Marie Curie
Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY - May 14, 1921
I could tell you many things
about radium and radioactivity and it would take a long time. But as we
can not do that, I shall only give you a short account of my early work
about radium. Radium is no more a baby, it is more than twenty years old,
but the conditions of the discovery were somewhat peculiar, and so it is
always of interest to remember them and to explain them.
We must go back to the year 1897. Professor Curie and I worked at that
time in the laboratory of the school of Physics and Chemistry where
Professor Curie held his lectures. I was engaged in some work on uranium
rays which had been discovered two years before by Professor Becquerel.
I spent some time in studying the way of making good measurements of the
uranium rays, and then I wanted to know if there were other elements,
giving out rays of the same kind. So I took up a work about all known
elements, and their compounds and found that uranium compounds are active
and also all thorium compounds, but other elements were not found active,
nor were their compounds. As for the uranium and thorium compounds, I
found that they were active in proportion to their uranium or thorium
content. The more uranium or thorium, the greater the activity, the
activity being an atomic property of the elements, uranium and thorium.
Them I took up measurements of minerals and I found that several of those
which contain uranium or thorium or both were active. But then the
activity was not what I could expect, it was greater than for uranium or
thorium compounds like the oxides which are almost entirely composed of
these elements.
Then I thought that there should be in the minerals some unknown element
having a much greater radioactivity than uranium or thorium. And I wanted
to find and to separate that element, and I settled to that work with
Professor Curie. We thought it would be done in several weeks or months,
but it was not so. It took many years of hard work to finish that task.
There was not one new ,lenient, there were several of them. But the most
important is radium, which could be separated in a pure state.
Now, the special interest of radium is in the intensity of its rays which
several million times greater than the uranium rays. And the effects of
the rays make the radium so important. If we take a practical point of
view, then the most important property of the rays is the production of
physiological effects on the cells of the human organism. These effects
may be used for the cure of several diseases. Good results have been
obtained in many cases. What is considered particularly important is the
treatment of cancer. The medical utilization of radium makes it necessary
to get that element in sufficient quantities. And so a factory of radium
was started to begin with in France, and later in America where a big
quantity of ore named carnotite is available. America does produce many
grams of radium every year, but the price is still very high because the
quantity of radium contained in the ore is so small. The radium is more
than a hundred thousand times dearer than gold.
But we must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it
would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And
this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point
of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for
the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a
scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.
The scientific history of radium is beautiful. The properties of the rays
have been studied very closely. We know that particles are expelled from
radium with a very great velocity near to that of the light. We know that
the atoms of radium are destroyed by expulsion of these particles, some of
which are atoms of helium. And in that way it has been proved that the
radioactive elements are constantly disintegrating and that they produce
at the end ordinary elements, principally helium and lead. That is, as you
see, a theory of transformation of atoms which are not stable, as was
believed before, but may undergo spontaneous changes.
Radium is not alone in having these properties. Many having other
radio-elements are known already, the polonium, the mesothorium, the
radiothorium, the actinium. We know also radioactive gases, named
emanations. There is a great variety of substances and effects in
radioactivity. There is always a vast field left to experimentation and I
hope that we may have some beautiful progress in the following years. It
is my earnest desire that some of you should carry on this scientific work
and keep for your ambition the determination to make a permanent
contribution to science.
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On the Discovery of Radium Famous Speech by Marie Curie
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