Summary

Chapter 12: Marie Sklodowska moved to Paris when she could not obtain the science training she wanted in her native Poland. There she met and married Pierre Curie. The couple is famous for their work on radioactivity and uranium, for which they won the Nobel Prize in physics 1903. Marie Curie then discovered two new elements through her experiments to purify uranium and won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911. After Pierre's death that same year, people became more interested in Marie's salacious personal life, including her romantic relationships, than her scientific achievements. Around the same time, the fields of chemistry and physics began to diverge more significantly. Important developments in these years include quantum mechanics and the discovery of chemical tracers that could be used to track molecules inside the body.

A second important collaboration is this chapter is that between Lise...