Abdulwahab F. Alahmari*,
Abstract
The most common name that is used by the feminist movement is Marie Curie's name as the first woman who conquered the men's world at that time (i.e. science). A deep and thorough investigation of the historical facts from first-source witnesses and physical evidences will prove what Marie Curie did and what her real achievements are. Where did she learn and earn her degrees? If there are any. Did she marry her professor? How did her husband die in a mysterious way? Was she involved in his death? Did she cheat on her husband? Did she have any sexual affairs with junior staff members? Why did the French Academy of Science (i.e. 100 scientists, professors, and doctors) voted to reject her application for membership in the academy? Why did the French public protest against her? Why did she work as a radiographer on a portable X-ray machine to image the wounded French soldiers? Was that a strategy to absorb the public heat? Was any of this have to do with anti-Semitism? Were her achievements exaggerated in the media? How did she win a Nobel Prize in physics and another Nobel Prize in chemistry? All these questions will be answered in this paper based on strong evidences. Naomi Pasachoff wrote a biography where she made Marie Curie a hero! But was she a hero? This paper will highlight all the propaganda written about this individual.
Introduction
You will find in Marie's Curie biography written by people like Naomi Pasachoff, which the bias affected her written biography for being from the same faith (Pasachoff, 1996). Pasachoff switched the facts and hid some fundamental issues (Pasachoff, 1996). In this paper, the true story will be highlighted and all the propaganda will be filtered by depending on non-biased sources.
Re-examining history
For example, in Naomi Pasachoff's biography of Marie Curie, she pushed away the narrative that Marie was an adulterous woman who committed adultery while her husband was still alive. She had two daughters with him when she was sexually active with other men. She did not go and cheat with someone from outside, but she committed adultery with a junior staff member in the same physics department at Sorbonne University, where she and her husband both work! Instead of showing this picture of Marie, Pasachoff claims she was a saint and a loving wife. Marie had no formal education except a degree in gymnastic school (in Poland), where she learned to jump from one man to another. She was a refugee and the French public saw that this woman did not achieve anything except being let in by her French husband, the scientist Pierre Curie, who works as her professor and they had a sexual relationship, which in the modern world will result in kicking the professor off the school. Becquerel was not opposing Marie for being of the same faith too. Her qualification was that she was married to a scientist. Pierre Curie pioneered piezoelectricity, crystallography, magnetism, and radioactivity; meanwhile, Marie Curie knew how to jump on other people's work and take it for herself.
Her husband died in a mysterious accident with a horse and some say he was hit by a truck. The medical examiner asked to do an autopsy, but Marie rejected it and refused to do the autopsy to see the cause of death (Lubenau and Pasqueir, 1995). Why a faithful wife wants to reject the autopsy of her husband? The autopsy will help the public to know how Pierre Curie died and to find out if it was a natural death or if he was killed. At the same time, she was committing adultery with another man. The Nobel Prize Committee asked Marie Curie to clear her name before receiving the award, according to Pasachoff (1996). Why does she need to clear her name? The French public protested Marie Curie taking the award, which belongs to the dead French Scientist Pierre Curie. In order to clean her image, she went to work on a portable X-ray for the wounded French soldiers in the war to reduce the French public's resentment towards her. She did not do it because she was a nice woman, but to calm the crowds. Some historians, like Pasachoff (1996), played the antisemitic card, the immigrant card, or the woman card in order to avoid the real issue, which is that she cheated on her husband, took his credit, took his money, and was made the hero in all of this.
The objective evidence
Marie and her husband graves were opened to shift (i.e. exhumation) their graves to France's National Mausoleum, the Panthéon, in Paris. Their graves were close to each other and the radiation dose was measured. Following the law of radioactivity, radioactivity has a never-ending half-life. Based on the empirical evidence, I know that the radiation dose was higher from Pierre Curie’s grave (240 nGy/h) than from Marie Curie’s grave (90 nGy/h) (Lubenau and Pasqueir, 1995). Some tried to justify it, but their justifications did not help (Lubenau and Pasqueir, 1995). The radiation dose that Marie has could be due to contacting her husband for a long time when he comes from work every day. Pierre Curie's body was a skeleton when the grave was opened, and Marie's body was intact. The idea that she dies due to having a high dose is questionable since her husband had twice the dose and did not die because of it, even though nobody knows the reason for his death since Marie banned any autopsy on his body. Marie Curie was not a religious herself and her burial ceremony had not been done in a religious fashion (Lubenau and Pasqueir, 1995). The wood on her coffin and his coffin shows that her wood did not decay as much as the wood of Pierre's grave did. The lead on her grave was intact; meanwhile, the copper plate on his grave did decay. Marie’s grave could be affected by Pierre’s grave background radiation dose since both graves are closed to each other. Radium 226 was found in Pierre's bones, which eliminates Marie’s discovery and the eligibility of the Nobel Prize. Furthermore, there is no sign of polonium 210 in Marie's body, even though the half-life of polonium is 138 days longer than the half-life of radon, which is 3.8 days! Not being religious led her to fornicate with other men since there are no objective morals. Marie used to travel without using her husband's last name on many occasions, even though some biography authors claim that she did that for her personal safety! Not using her husband's last name indicates that she does not love him anymore.
The French Acadmy of Science
Marie submitted a request to join the French Academy of Science in 1911 and 100 scientists voted that she did not deserve to be a member. Why would 100 scientists, professors, and doctors reject her? Are all of them racists? Similarly, the French public protested against her; are all the French people racist too? No, Marie was a gold digger who did not mind stepping on a few throats to make some profit for herself. Was this decision have to do with anti-Semitism or being immigrant? According to a published article, it was her qualifications and her promiscuous lifestyle that were the reasons behind her rejection. That’s why today such women are promoted in the media and good, decent women are left behind (Markel, 2021). According to Lubenau and Pasqueir (1995), Marie was given one gram of radium from an American woman and Marie kept touring the United States with the gram for 6 weeks and a half; meanwhile, she felt very sick. Was Marie not used to radiation from radium at her lab? The smartest scientist did not think that this radioactive material was making me sick. So, if you know that the radio is making you sick, why do you not throw it away? But she kept it, which shows that this person is not a smart person, nevertheless, Nobel Prize material. These are legitimate questions that need to be answered. When they buried Pierre, there was a concern that his body was contaminated; when Marie was buried, there was no concern that her body was contaminated (Lubenau and Pasqueir, 1995).
Portable X-ray
Marie Curie invented the portable X-ray, which is the worst idea ever made in the medical field. There are 40 reasons why portable X-ray is a bad idea and should be banned (Alahmari, 2024). There are other real inventions like liner slit scanning (i.e. lodox-statscan machine), which images the whole body in 13 seconds and is safe for pregnant women. This is what is considered a good idea for imaging patients from head to toe with a low radiation dose.
Conclusion
Marie Curie is nothing but a charlatan that is pushed on science and the French people did not protest for being anti-Semitic or xenophobic toward Marie, but she did not work and she took other people's work credit to herself. She might be involved in her husband's death and she lived as a promiscuous woman with no honor. She did a Public Relations (PR) campaign to make the French people change their minds, but Marie was pushed in the media as a super star woman in science, but all she knew was gymnastics.
