The Fevers of Reason

by Gerald Weissmann

  His death brought to an end two remarkably creative careers in physical science, his own and that of his wife, Maria Salomea Sklodowskaa, known to the world as Mme Curie. On the rue Dauphine, she later recollected, “I lost my beloved Pierre and with him all hope and all support for the rest of my life.” She was right: for although Mme Curie was to survive her husband until 1934, her contributions to science after his death were less than innovative; she turned her tough mind to the application of their discoveries, to teaching young scientists, and to construction of the Radium Institute, which she turned into a world center of physical science. She also became a secular saint of feminist culture on both sides of the Atlantic, the subject of her daughter’s best-seller Madame Curie (1937), and heroine of sentimental publicists who hailed her for real or fancied radium cures. “More nonsense has been written about radium than the philosopher’s stone,” complained George Bernard Shaw in 1931, and he was right.

  But there was no nonsense about the science. What a run the two Curies had together! In the course of six short years they had laid the foundations for the next century of physics and set the clock of our atomic age. That work earned Pierre and Marie Curie an acclaimed Nobel Prize in Physics (with Henri Becquerel in 1903) and Marie a more controversial Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911). Those six years are the centerpiece not only of Eve Curie’s biography of her mother, but also of all subsequent such works, including those of Françoise Giroud (1986) and Susan Quinn (1995). Perhaps in keeping with the temperament of their subject, each is written with more diligence than grace.

  The Curies were married in 1895, after Pierre had already become famous for his work with his brother, Jacques Curie, on piezoelectricity (the phenomenon that some crystals, e.g. ceramic or bone, generate an electric current when compressed). He soon earned his doctorate for studies with Paul Langevin on paramagnetic resonance, establishing that the moment of an atom or electron varies inversely with temperature. It was the year that Wilhelm Roentgen took the first picture of the bones of his wife’s hand by means of his novel rays.

  By 1897, Henri Becquerel had found that uranium also produced rays—“emanations”—that left Roentgen-like shadows on photographic plates kept in the dark. Almost simultaneously, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, discovered that the “ionizing” emanations from uranium imparted an electric charge to the air. In December of that year, Pierre and Marie set out to quantify the Becquerel emanations—the ionizing radiation—of a great variety of natural substances. For this purpose they employed the piezoelectric quartz balance, an instrument that Pierre had designed, and by February had found that the residue of pitchblende from which uranium had been extracted gave far greater signals than uranium itself. They correctly deduced that there was an ionizing substance far more active than uranium lurking in the sticky brew. It was the same year that Zola wrote “J’accuse” and France split forever into the Dreyfusards and their opponents.

  By the end of 1898, the Curies had postulated that the new element, which they named “radium,” decayed into another element, which they called “polonium.” They gave the name “radioactivity” to the emanations from these elements. In 1902, by means of heroic preparative procedures, Marie Curie at last isolated radium in pure form. Later that year, Pierre calculated that one gram of radium emitted 3.7 × 1010 disintegrations per second: we call this amount of radioactivity one curie. And shortly thereafter he made the heuristic discovery that one gram of radium could heat one gram of water from 0° to 100°C: we call this sort of transformation “atomic energy,” and today it powers more than half of France. By 1903 Pierre and Marie Curie had won a Nobel prize; they had also come down with the first signs of radium sickness.

  Six unmatched years of discovery in the setting of the Third Republic, with axes drawn between right and left, church and state, theory and application, risk and benefit of a new science in a new century. It’s a grand story, and while the Curies were on the spoor of the new, with the Dreyfus case breaking about them, it’s an exemplary tale of science in service to reason. But after Pierre’s death on the rue Dauphine, the story of Marie Curie becomes less a life in science and more a story of The Career, The Scandal, and The Legend. Her biographers (hagiographers?), led by Eve Curie, take us through laundered accounts of the Curie’s adulterous affair with Paul Langevin, the outrageous attacks on her by the anti-Dreyfusard press, and the turn of her attention from science to the broader social scene. These proved to be as successful as her work in the lab. It was in recognition of the many mobile X-ray units she organized during World War I that a grateful France forgave her for the Langevin affair by permitting her to establish the Radium Institute.

  It is difficult to guess what inner doubts or conflicts might have troubled the pale, intense widow in a plain black dress who lived on the fashionable quai de Béthune, the entrepeneuse who raised millions in France and the United States for her Institute by encouraging claims of cures for cancer. Nor does any material yet published yield insight into what must have been the remarkable relationship between Mme Curie and her daughter, a physicist at her mother’s Institute, who married a brilliant young coworker to play out the story of Marie et Pierre Redux. Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie not only shared a Nobel Prize (Chemistry, 1935) “in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements”—the third Nobel in one family—but also an abiding attachment to Soviet communism. The story of the Curies reached from the quai de Béthune to the podium of the Comintern.

  The political and dynamic undertones of this part of the story are not in the public record. But that would have been just fine with Mme C: except for some painful letters addressed to her husband after his death, her private voice was as impersonal as her public speech. The Curies met in 1894 and were made for each other. Both Maria Sklodowka, daughter of a Polish gymnasium teacher, and Pierre, son of a Communard homeopath, were raised in the frugal folkways of the hardworking petite bourgeoisie. One catches the flavor of Curie’s biographers—and a quaint view of genetics—from Susan Quinn’s description of how Marie’s mother learned to cobble her children’s shoes: “Such willingness to do manual work was inherited by her youngest daughter, and was essential to Marie’s success many years later in isolating radium.” The intensity with which the Curies stare at us from their public portraits suggests that what Einstein said of Marie might have applied to Pierre as well: “Madame Curie is very intelligent but has the soul of a herring, which means she is poor when it comes to the art of joy and pain.”

  The two cold fish had sought each other out from among a flashier school of broadly cultivated, anticlerical scientists collected by the Sorbonne at the fin de siècle. Those glittering mathematicians, physicists, and chemists formed the phalanx of the positivist movement and became a vanguard of the Dreyfusards. As might be expected, the Sorbonne positivists became the targets of the protofascist right and the fans of La France profonde, the deep, “true” France. As part of a successful attack on Marie Curie’s nomination to the Académie, Leon Daudet chimed in against the professors in his rightist journal l’Action française:

  They are all like that fanatic Poincaré, a man of genius, they say, in mathematics but stupid and hateful. When it comes to the rest; the Jew of color photography Lippmann, that fanatic Dreyfusard Appell, dean of the faculty of Sciences . . . [they] no longer hide behind the life of the Saints, but behind algebra, physics and chemistry treatises. . . . They intend in fact to chase from the house all who don’t think like them, don’t feel like them, who have the audacity not to deny God, not to insult Rome, go to mass, to raise their children as Christians.

  Nowadays the Curies are ignored in cultural histories of the Third Republic (Jerrold Siegel’s Bohemian Paris and Eugen Weber’s Fin-de-Siècle Paris come to mind). But from the laws and units with which their names will forever be associated, their discoveries remain part of the fabric of twentieth-century science. For me, the lives and work of these Dreyfusards of science constitute a monument to reason that
their contemporaries in the arts have not quite matched. Official France agrees: their names are woven into the fabric of Paris. The square before the École Polytechnique (in the fourth arrondissment) is named after the dashing but very married Paul Langevin, whom Einstein said would have discovered relativity had he himself not done so and whose affair with widowed Marie almost cost her the second Nobel prize. His was the noblest career in the resistance—and he suffered for it. The square before the Sorbonne (also in the fourth) is named after mathematician Paul Painlevé, who was Langevin’s second at the duel he fought to preserve Mme Curie’s honor. Painlevé was another early supporter of Einstein; he was political enough to become a minister of war. Langevin quipped that Painlevé had studied Einstein thoroughly, though unfortunately not until after he had written about him, a sequence acquired perhaps in politics. Marie’s other partisans in the Curie–Langevin scandal dot the landscape as well: Gabriel Lippmann, the Nobel physicist who invented color reproduction and who presented the Curies’ discovery of radium to the Academy of Sciences is remembered behind the Place de la Nation (in the twentieth arrondissement); Paul Appell, dean of the Faculty of Sciences, has an avenue of his own near the Cité Universitaire (in the fourteentth)—it leads to the avenue Rockefeller; the rue Henri Poincaré loops off boulevard Gambetta (in the twentieth); and Emil Borel is off the boulevard Périphérique in the seventeenth.

  The story of Pierre and Marie Curie is a tribute to a dazzling set of discoveries jointly made by a man and a woman of genius. “L’Art c’est moi; la science c’est nous,” wrote Claude Bernard, and that nous remains independent of gender, psychic baggage, or family romance. Among the most memorable photographs in Quinn’s book is a late one of an intense Marie Curie on the balcony of her Institute behind the École Normale. Her lined face looks forward to the future, her hands are scrumbled by the scars of radium; it’s an image that sums up the hope and the harm of her discovery. She would have been pleased that she is shown overlooking the street that we now call the rue Pierre et Marie Curie.

  Beside the Golden Door

  18.

  Welcome to America: Einstein’s Letter to the Dean

  More than 4 million Syrian refugees have been forced to flee the country. . . . The United States has a long history of helping the world’s most vulnerable people, but we have also faltered when faced with difficult decisions to allow refugees into the country.

  —Message to the President from seventy-two Members of Congress (September 2015)

  We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way [to] postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.

  —Breckinridge Long, U.S. State Department (June 26, 1940)

  Please go at once to the Dean of that University, Mr. Currier McEwen, and give him the enclosed letter.

  —Albert Einstein (August 10, 1939)

  IN THE FALL OF 2015, THE NEWS WAS ALL ABOUT BORDERS. On the one hand, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) won a well-deserved Lasker Award for their response to the Ebola virus; on the other hand, Hungary erected a border-long barbed-wire fence to prevent tattered Syrian refugees from tracking north. Transgressors were treated to pepper spray. Not to be outdone, American nativists demanded a thirty-foot-high barrier across our southern border to deter Mexican immigration and a somewhat lower barrier on our northern border to exclude the riffraff from Canada.

  After an early welcome by Germany, borders closed across Europe to leave the bulk of Syrian refugees camped in unplowed fields in Greece or Serbia. Hunger, thirst, and dysentery were rife among the huddled masses yearning to breathe free farther north. Those who managed to breach the Hungarian border were packed into buses destined for reception camps that promised freedom and a shower. Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, claimed that he was protecting European civilization. Slovakia would admit only Christian refugees, not the Muslims of Syria or Afghanistan. At a Czech railway station, officials detained refugees to scrawl identification numbers on their forearms with felt-tipped pens.

  Promises of freedom after a shower, racial quotas, and indelible numbers on the forearm seemed like flashbacks to the Hitler years. Newsreels of the worst episode in Central European history were resurrected on iPads and laptops in 2015. It is no wonder that memories of the Holocaust prompted members of Congress to remind an American president that our country had “faltered when faced with difficult decisions to allow refugees into the country.”

  “FALTER” SEEMS A TAD MILD IN RETROSPECT. Immigration policies set by a nativist U.S. Department of State in the late 1930s assured that 90 percent of the quota slots allotted for immigrants from countries ruled by Hitler and Mussolini would remain unfilled. It has been estimated that had those visaless refugees received consular approval, an additional 190,000 could have escaped the teeming shores of Europe—or the showers at Auschwitz. Alas, the director of the Immigrant Visa Section at the Department of State, Breckinridge Long (1881–1985), wasn’t lifting any lamps beside the golden door. Long and company worked out a simple solution to limit immigration of refugees, mainly Jewish: paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork. A paperwork fence would protect our borders!

  Long had ordered consular officials in Europe “to postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.” One assumes that Long’s previous experience as ambassador to Mussolini’s Italy had guided his policies. In 1933, in a letter to Joseph E. Davies, ambassador to the Soviet Union, he had praised the Fascist regime in terms that Ezra Pound could not have bettered, and to Almy Edmunds, wife of Judge Henry L. Edmunds, he wrote, “Italy today is the most interesting experiment in government to come above the horizon since the formation of the Constitution 150 years ago today.”

  Breckinridge Long and his paperwork fence set the stage for an urgent letter by Albert Einstein to Dean Currier McEwen dated August 10, 1939. Einstein was worried that Professor Rudolf Ehrmann, who had been Einstein’s personal doctor in Berlin, would be swept up in a Nazi roundup. However, between Ehrmann and a visa to America stood the paper fence of Breckinridge Long. Although the doctor had already gained a year-long lecture appointment at New York University, the U.S. consul dragged his legs and demanded written assurance that Ehrmann receive a full-time two-year appointment at the school. The date of the letter, August 10, 1939, is telling—eight days after the famous Einstein–Szilard letter to President Roosevelt explaining that it had “become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which . . . extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.” Four weeks later, Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II began.

  EHRMANN WAS NOT YOUR AVERAGE FAMILY DOCTOR; he had left his mark on medical science. Physiologists remember his bioassay on adrenaline (based on dilation of the amphibian pupil). Gastroenterologists know his work on pancreatic function and gastric acid secretion, and rheumatologists of my generation recognize his name in the Ehrmann–Sneddon form of a skin condition known as livedo reticularis. Ehrmann had risen to the rank of professor of internal medicine at the University Hospital of Berlin, and his hometown of Altenstädt named him one of the 50 most illustrious Germans.

  However, in August 1939, there he was: a 60-year-old man huddled on the teeming shores of Heimat—“homeland”—with the Gestapo in the wings. Einstein received an urgent appeal from Ehrmann’s son Rolf, who himself had escaped from Germany the year before. In that note, Ehrmann asked Einstein to write directly to Washington, an effort that the physicist knew to be completely fruitless “as I know from previous experience.” Einstein suggested a more receptive ear than that of Breckinridge Long:

  We must try to get Prof. E. a fellowship for 2 years at NYU. Please go at once to the Dean of that University, Mr. Currier McEwen, and give him the enclosed letter. If he is away, ask for his address or find out if someone else can make such an important decision in
his stead. Tell him that a 2-year contract is required by the consul. Tell him, too, that if the University is so inclined, we have a good prospect of having his salary for the second year guaranteed by an immigration organization.

  McEwen responded immediately. It was already August, but the appropriate letters went back and forth rapidly, and by the time war had begun, Ehrmann was on his way to the United States. By October, he had taken his place as a clinical professor of medicine (his specialty, gastroenterology) at the NYU School of Medicine and as an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital. He went on to establish a clinical practice based at Beth Israel Hospital and published a half a dozen articles in English before his retirement. And in 1955, when Einstein was terminally ill, Ehrmann rushed down to Princeton, New Jersey, to be by his side.

  MCEWEN’S ALMOST REFLEX ACTION WAS ONE OF A SERIES of humanitarian gestures that served him and his university well. Rockefeller-trained, Currier McEwen was a distinguished rheumatologist before the term was even invented. He had been a founder and president of the American Rheumatism Association (now the American College of Rheumatology) and made important contributions to the treatment of rheumatic fever. As dean of the NYU School of Medicine from 1937 to 1955, he presided over at least twenty lifesaving appointments to German and Austrian medical scientists. Among these were the radiologist Rudolph Bucky, the biochemist Ephraim Racker, and Nobel laureate Otto Loewi.

  Loewi’s story is almost an echo of Ehrmann’s. Otto Loewi, professor of pharmacology at the University of Graz in Austria, had won a Nobel prize in 1936 for his discovery of acetylcholine, known in German as Vaguststoff. But no matter how high the honor, when the Nazis seized Austria in 1938, he was awakened from his sleep by a dozen young storm troopers armed with guns who hustled him off to jail. Loewi owed his rapid release from prison and temporary refugee status in London to his co-holder of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Sir Henry Hallett Dale. However, with no job and no money, Loewi had been forced to instruct the Nobel organization’s bank in Stockholm to transfer the Nobel prize money to a prescribed Nazi-controlled bank. Once safe in England, Loewi asked his colleague, Walter B. Cannon (the Wisdom of the Body Cannon), to lobby for a position at Harvard University. However, by 1940, an influx of great and near-great European scientists to Harvard had made President James Conant reluctant to offer a faculty position to other immigrants, even to a Nobel laureate.