Science: Death of Mme Curie

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Possibly Mme Curie thought of the years of her work alone, of how she established the atomic nature of radioactivity, of how she isolated pure radium from the chloride, of her work on cancer therapy, of her Wartime labors in military hospitals. Possibly she thought of her last years, passed mainly in managing the Institut du Radium's Curie Laboratory which she founded in 1912. lecturing at the Sorbonne, writing treatises and books. Then there were the honors which had been showered on her as on no other woman of her time—the Nobel Prize awarded to her, her husband and Becquerel in 1903, to her alone in 1911; the gram of radium presented to her by President Harding in 1921 in behalf of U. S. admirers; the $50,000 given her by President Hoover in 1929. But modest Mme Curie always turned away from such honors, such gifts. At her bedside last week were her daughters—Eve, the musician, Irene the scientist who worked with her husband in better quarters but in much the same spirit as Pierre and Marie Curie a generation before them. Mme Curie had lived long enough to see Irene honored as co-discoverer of a phenomenon that excited physicists the world over, artificial radio-activity (TIME, Feb. 12).

The sanatorium lights shone brightly in the summer dusk. Marie Curie lapsed into coma. Next morning at daybreak she died. Her body was taken to Paris. In a crypt 20 miles from Paris, her remains were placed beside those of her husband. Only witnesses were her daughters, son-in-law, a handful of intimate associates. One by one, in silence, they filed past the casket and each laid on it a rose. The world Press rang with acclaim for the greatest woman scientist in history.