The preeminent science writer discusses the untold story of Marie Curie’s other legacy—the dozens of young women who trained under her and launched stellar scientific careers of their own.

Nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name. She is the first Nobel laureate to be decorated in two separate fields—physics in 1903 with her husband, Pierre, and chemistry by herself in 1911. In her new biography, The Elements of Marie Curie, Dava Sobel focuses not just on Curie’s legendary genius, but on the 45 women who worked in her lab—from Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, to Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sobel chronicles Curie’s remarkable life of discovery alongside the lives of the women who followed down the trail she blazed.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Dava Sobel is the author of the international bestseller Longitude, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist Galileo’s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, And the Sun Stood Still, and The Glass Universe, and co-author of The Illustrated Longitude. She is the recipient of the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award, the Kumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. A former New York Times science reporter, and currently editor of the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American, she lives on Long Island.

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Dava Sobel © Glen Allsop for Hodinkee