Science has no borders, but scientists have their motherland.
—— Louis Pasteur (1822-1895, French scientist)
Written by | Li Yan
Madame Curie is a pioneer in the study of radioactive elements . She is not only the first woman to win the Nobel Prize , He is also the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice in his life. The story of Madame Curie's discovery of radium is almost a household name, and later generations also commemorate this great woman in various ways. Whether in coins or in film and television works, Madame Curie appears mostly in a serious and dignified image unique to scientists.
Madame Curie's motherland Poland and France where she lived for a long time have banknotes to commemorate this outstanding daughter with dual nationality - 20,000 face value zloty (1989 edition) and 500 francs (1988 edition). Both of these banknotes are no longer in circulation. (Photo source: umich.edu)
But this article wants to focus on another little-known scene: She drove her car day and night on the front line of the war, guiding more than a dozen battlefield medical service teams . The roads are muddy and car failures occur frequently. Sometimes she even needs to use a jack to change the tires of the car.
It may be difficult for us to associate the above wartime actions with the image of Madame Curie, and this is another outstanding contribution that many people ignore - pioneer of radiology and X-ray diagnosis and treatment Promoter.
hopes to donate the Nobel Prize Medal
The story starts from the summer of 1914. On July 30, Madame Curie had been looking forward to for a long time and finally built all the Radium Research Institute in Paris. She was confident in inspecting the new laboratory and thinking about the new scientific research plan. However, she could not anticipate that an unprecedented cruel war was approaching and completely disrupted her experimental arrangements.
At the end of June of this year, Austria-Hungarian Empire Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Sarajevo radicals in Serbian . This occasional unfortunate incident became the leader of World War . Teng. On July 28, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia; on July 30, Russia began war mobilization; on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia; on August 3, Germany declared war on France, and on the same day France also issued a general mobilization order .
The war began, the German army advanced rapidly, the French army retreated step by step, and the French capital Paris faced a serious threat. Madame Curie decisively sealed the 1g of radium, which she and her husband worked hard to extract, in a lead container, and transported it by train to Bordeaux, the temporary capital of wartime France, for proper preservation.
After installing her precious experimental raw materials, she quickly returned to Paris on the front line. At that time, many scientific researchers in France had to give up scientific research and were mobilized to go to the battlefield. However, as a woman, Madame Curie was the winner of the two Nobel Prizes, and she did not have the obligation or urgency to go to the battlefield. She was unwilling to be a bystander of the war against the bloody storm caused by the world war.
As for Madame Curie's original intention to devote herself to this war without hesitation, we may get some clues from her letter to Paul Langevin in January 1915:
I am determined to do my best to serve me In France, because there is no way to help my unfortunate motherland do anything...
As an active member of the Poles' Committee in France, Madame Curie devotes her life to the cause of independence and liberation of Poland. Her concern for the motherland not only reflects the naming of the new element Polar (Po), which we are familiar with, but also in this cruel war between France and Germany (Germany was one of the countries that divided Poland at that time).
Madame Curie spared no effort to contribute to the war. At the beginning of the war, she planned to donate her Nobel Prize medal to support the war, but the French National Bank refused to accept such commemorative items, so she turned to buy the war with almost all the Nobel Prize bonuses. Bonds.
However, Madame Curie felt that donating for the war was far from enough, and she was still thinking about how to serve the war with the science and technology she was good at.
"Little Curie" that saves lives
In World War I, the weapons used by various belligerent countries have undergone major innovations compared with the 19th century. Not only rifles but also machine guns and artillery shells. The body was damaged by metal shrapnel, and the soldiers' disability and mortality rate was extremely high. With the renewal of weapons, medicine is also making progress slowly. Since the discovery of X-ray by German physicist Rontgen in 1895, doctors have been able to detect internal organs by taking photos, which is crucial for detecting gunshot wounds and fractures. However, when the war broke out, X-rays were in medicine. The use is still very limited. France only has a small number of X-ray devices, and it is far away from the battlefield. Many injured people lost the best time to treat during the transfer process.
Madame Curie hopes to set up X-ray machine on the front line of the battlefield, so that the injured can undergo fluoroscopy examination in a timely manner to ensure that the surgeon has timely and accurate surgery. She proposed her own ideas to the relevant departments of the Army Department. Despite her many explanations, the Army still felt that it was too difficult - neither so many X-ray machines nor many technicians...
Madame Curie's initial request was not approved, but she once again carried forward that kind The unyielding momentum of extracting trace amounts of radium from a few kilograms of asphalt and turning its attention to wealthy friends and colleagues. After Madame Curie's appeals from many parties and donations from all parties, she received some funding and car support. She also convinced French X-ray machine manufacturers to donate instruments and small generators, and under her auspices, they assembled the facilities on modified cars. This design not only solves the difficulty of a limited number of X-ray machines transferring between battlefield fronts, but also ensures the power supply of X-ray machines. At the end of 1914, Madame Curie finally got 20 medical vehicles with X-ray equipment that could be driven to the front line.
Madame Curie and her modified car with X-ray instruments designed. (Photo source: theinstitute.ieee.org) What is more difficult to solve than money is the shortage of technicians. So Madame Curie decided to do it first. At that time, female drivers were very rare in France, but she decided to study driving skills hard and obtained a car driver's license at the age of 47. In order to deal with the bad road conditions during wartime, she had to learn to replace car tires and even master some basic car repair skills.
The operation complexity of X-ray equipment a hundred years ago is far from comparable today, and many front-line doctors are not competent. Although Madame Curie had studied radiology at Sorbonne University in France before, she had no experience in actually operating an X-ray machine, which did not serve as a reason for her to back down. She participated in the crash course in radiology medicine and quickly mastered the operation and use of X-ray equipment. Not only that, Madame Curie also had great courage to let her eldest daughter Ilena, who had been hiding from war in northwest France, return to her side, and Ilena also became the first target of Madame Curie's training. When she thought that her eldest daughter could stand alone in a field hospital, she opened a crash course in radiology for more health workers in the recently established Radiology Institute, teaching them how to use X-ray machines to find the location of foreign objects in the human body.
1915, Ilena (left) and Marie Curie (right) were installing and operating radiation diagnostic and treatment instruments in a hospital in Belgium. (Photo source: theinstitute.ieee.org)
Throughout the war, with the efforts of Madame Curie, the Institute of Radiology trained about 150 female nurses who were proficient in the use of radiation medical equipment. She also often drives her modified X-ray car on the battlefield day and night. Many of the soldiers who are strong in R&F admire her passion like fire. At that time, I don’t know how many people remember that this woman who was on the battlefield and desperately treated the wounded was an outstanding scientific master who won the Nobel Prize twice. Many wounded people received precise surgical treatment after timely perspective, thus avoiding a large number of unnecessary deaths. People also affectionately call X-ray vision vehicles "Little Curies" (French: petites Curies).
(Photo source: history.com)
Under Madame Curie's strong appeal and practice, more people have realized the importance of radio medicine, and the government's investment in it has continued to increase. Nearly 200 field hospitals that can use X-ray instruments were established throughout the war. At the end of the war, aircraft were even specially designed to quickly build temporary wards of radiation medicine, and more than 1 million soldiers received X-ray diagnosis and treatment during the war.
can quickly build a plane for the temporary ward of radiation medicine (photo source: carestream.com)
It is worth mentioning that Madame Curie is not the only scientist who serves this war with scientific research results. As you may know, German chemist Fritz Haber proposed the development and deployment of chlorine gas in World War I, which set the forefront of the poison gas war. In the poisonous gas war, the French chemist Victor Greena , who was responsible for creating highly toxic phosgene. Like Madame Curie, they were both former Nobel Prize in Chemistry. We may not be able to demand how scientists should contribute to their motherland in the face of such a cruel war, but compared to scientists who make terrifying weapons, Madame Curie is urging to save lives and helping the wounded with her actions. It's worth admiring.
The price of victory
This protracted war finally ended on November 11, 1918. Afterwards, Madame Curie did not receive any official reward from France for her outstanding contributions in the war, but instead her daughter Ilena received the reward from the military. Despite this, Madame Curie was still full of joy at the victory of the war. Her joy was not only in that France was the victory, but also in witnessing the motherland Poland becoming an independent country again after World War I.
In her letter to her brother Joseph, she mentioned:
Now, those of us who are "born in slavery and raised under shackles" have finally seen our country resurrected. This is our dream forever. But we never hoped to see this time with our own eyes. We thought that maybe even our children could not see this time, and this time has come!
Madame Curie also paid for the victory of this war. A huge price. After the war, she soon returned to the Radium Institute to continue to study radioactive elements interrupted by the war, and summarized her experience of applying radiology during wartime into a book - "Radiology in War", Published in 1919. However, Madame Curie's health has deteriorated since then, until she passed away in 1934 due to malignant leukemia.
Regarding the cause of Madame Curie, it is generally believed that she has been engaged in radioactive elements for a long time and has been contaminated with dangerous doses of radioactive elements. So Madame Curie's body, like her manuscript, was also placed in a lead coffin that could shield radiation. However, Madame Curie did not think so during her lifetime. She felt that she was not sick due to radium poisoning, but was exposed to X-rays excessively during the war. Indeed, although the intensity of X-rays used in medical diagnosis has been greatly reduced today, this was far from the situation on the frontline of the war a hundred years ago. At that time, people lacked the awareness and conditions for X-ray protection.
In 1995, her body was relocated to the Pantheon. During this process, people also investigated the content of radioactive elements in her body. The results showed that although the residual radiation element in her body was slightly higher than that of ordinary people, it was far from reaching a life-threatening dose. In other words, Madame Curie might be really right, and the prolonged operation of wartime X-ray instruments may be the culprit of her health.
At the end of this article, we might as well review Einstein 's evaluation of Madame Curie in her eulogy:
When a noble character like Madame Curie ends her life, we should not be satisfied with just remembering her The work results have contributed to humanity. The significance of first-class figures to the times and historical processes may be greater in terms of their moral qualities than simply intellectual achievements. Even the latter, they depend on the degree of character, far more than usually thought.
References
[1] "Biography of Madame Curie", written by Eve Curie, translated by Zuo Mingche, Commercial Press
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
[3] http ://theinstitute.ieee.org/tech-history/technology-history/how-marie-curie-helped-save-a-million-soldiers-during-world-war-i
[4] CCTV-9 documentary movie— Marie Curie: The frontline of saving lives
[5] Madame Curie: An outstanding contributor in World War I, compiled by Huang Sen, SMC Science Media Center
[6] X-ray, not radium, may have killed Curie. Nature, 1995, Vol.377
article header and cover pictures Source: Wikimedia
Source: Mr. Sai
Editor: Major Tom
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