Xavier Roqué

Marie curie and the radium industry: A preliminary sketch

Abstract I argue that Marie Curies involvement with the radium industry was essential to her research agenda. Curies strategy of accumulation, through which she sought to further the study of radioactivity by the sheer accumulation of radioactive substances, demanded industrial resources. This led her to collaborate with the nascent French radium industry in the 1900s, and to seek logistic assistance from several radium producers, including the worlds largest, in the interwar years. Increasingly uneasy about her dependence on firms, however, during the 1920s Curie argued relentlessly for the creation of a national centre for radioactivity in France, of which an industrial facility would be an essential part. Oblivious to disciplinary boundaries, Curies project reflected her integrated vision of radioactivity as the science of the radioelements. Curies enduring industrial concerns challenge her carefully‐built heroic image as a pure scientist ‐ which can be traced back, somewhat ironically, to Curies...

Tracers of modern technoscience

Together with genes, drugs or standardized laboratory mice, isotopes might well be considered amongst the scientific objects that shaped science, technology, and medicine in the 20th century 1. Isotopes are forms of the same element that differ in the number of neutrons in their nuclei. Chemically identical yet physically distinct, ever since the end of World War II they have been widely applied to scientific research, medical diagnosis and therapy, and industrial control processes. The production, distribution and uses of isotopes have therefore borne witness to key aspects of modern technoscience, such as the role of state agencies vis-à-vis private companies and the market, or the relation between science, politics and the military. Affording a specific view of these developments, isotopes work as tracers of modern technoscience that invite historical research. This invitation has not altogether been lost on historians of science and technology. A number of studies, some by contributors to this volume, tell us about their role in the establishment and legitimisation of national nuclear programmes, or the creation of disciplines such as biochemistry and molecular biology. These studies are referred to below, in connection with the main themes of this collection. Still missing, however, is a comparative and comprehensive transnational approach to the rise and impact of isotope science. John Krige recently exemplified such an approach in the form of a «Cold War fable based on fact», which traced the journey of a sample of

Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information

Muller had initially conceived the experiments to be carried out using a vial of radium, but it broke accidentally, leading him to use X-rays instead. As shown in the chapter on Muller’s research, there seems to be some arbitrariness in how Campos reconstructs the path from early vitalist interpretations of radium’s nature to the work of the “founding fathers” of modern genetics. Focusing solely on radium, and almost exclusively on British or American developments, Campos misses the opportunity to deliver a comprehensive history of early biological applications of radioactivity. After all, radium was not the only material put into use in biological research, and most important researches on the then called field of “radio-agriculture” were carried in continental Europe. This was indeed recognised by the main actors of Campos’ narrative, who described, for example, a treatise of the University of Prague professors Julius Stoklasa and Josef Penkava as “doubtless the most exhaustive publication on the subject” (p. 143). Indeed, the circulation of materials and techniques, which allowed for the very possibility of experimental work crossing the disciplinary frontiers of physics and biology, is scarcely addressed. In short,Radium and the Secret of Life is a collection of detailed and well-researched stories about some neglected but extremely interesting cases of early radiobiology. However, Campos’s focus on the spread of ideas in a small community of scientists – its circulation in broader audiences is only briefly discussed in the first chapter – falls short of addressing the complexity and cultural entanglements of the early connections between biology and radioactivity.