12 LIFE: ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN 



tunately, Mme. Curie also tested the original ores (pitchblende 

 and carnotite) from which uranium is extracted. To her astonish- 

 ment, they showed much greater radioactivity than pure uranium. 

 The conclusion was obvious: the ores must contain some substance 

 or substances more strongly radioactive than uranium. 



With her husband, Professor Pierre Curie (Nobel prize, 1903) 

 she began the exhausting task of trying to isolate this important 

 "impurity." Their first paper (1898) 3 stated: "We believe the 

 substance we have extracted from pitchblende contains a metal 

 not yet observed related to bismuth in its analytical properties. 

 If the existence of this new metal is confirmed we propose to call 

 it polonium from the name of the original country of one of us." 



A few months later came the announcement of radium, the 

 radioactivity of which is actually about 2,000,000 times that of 

 uranium. The Curies wrote: "The new radioactive substance 

 contains a very strong proportion of barium; in spite of this its 

 radioactivity is considerable. The radioactivity of radium there- 

 fore must be enormous." 



To show the difficulties overcome by these great French scien- 

 tists in making their epoch-making discoveries, the following is 

 quoted from "Madame Curie — A Biography," by Eve Curie, her 

 daughter: 4 



"It was necessary, of course, to buy this crude material and to pay 

 for its transportation to Paris. Pierre and Marie appropriated the 

 required sum from their very slight savings. They were not foolish 

 enough to ask for official credits. ... If two physicists on the scent of 

 an immense discovery had asked the University of Paris or the French 

 Government for a grant to buy pitchblende residues they would have 

 been laughed at. In any case their letter would have been lost in the 

 files of some office, and they would have had to wait for months for a 

 reply, probably unfavorable in the end. Out of the traditions and 

 principles of the French Revolution, which created the metric system, 

 founded the Normal School, and encouraged science in many circum- 

 stances, the State seemed to have retained, after more than a century, 

 only the deplorable words pronounced by Fouquier-Tinville at the 

 trial in which Lavoisier was condemned to the guillotine: 'The Repub- 

 lic has no need for scientists.' " 



Rutherford and Radiations 



In 1895 Ernest Rutherford began work in the Cavendish Lab- 

 oratory at Cambridge (England) on the ionization of gases by 

 x-rays. Reading of Becquerel's work, he made a systematic exami- 



