The Faber Book of Science

by John Carey

  The excitement generated by the new element is caught in Eve Curie’s account:

  Prodigious radium! Purified as a chloride, it appeared to be a dull-white powder, which might easily be mistaken for common kitchen salt. But its properties, better and better known, seemed stupefying. Its radiation, by which it had become known to the Curies, passed all expectation in intensity; it proved to be two million times stronger than that of uranium. Science had already analysed and dissected it, subdividing the rays into three different kinds, which traversed the hardest and most opaque matter – undergoing modification, of course. Only a thick screen of lead proved to be able to stop the insidious rays in their invisible flight.

  Radium had its shadow, its ghost: it spontaneously produced a singular gaseous substance, the emanation of radium, which was also active and destroyed itself clearly even when enclosed in a glass tube, according to rigorous law. Its presence was to be proved in the waters of numerous thermal springs.

  Another defiance of the theories which seemed the immovable basis of physics was that radium spontaneously gave off heat. In one hour it produced a quantity of heat capable of melting its own weight of ice. If it was protected against external cold it grew warmer, and its temperature would go up as much as ten degrees centigrade or more above that of the surrounding atmosphere.

  What could it not do? It made an impression on photographic plates through black paper; it made the atmosphere a conductor of electricity and thus discharged electroscopes at a distance; it coloured the glass receivers which had the honour of containing it with mauve and violet; it corroded and, little by little, reduced to powder the paper or the cottonwool in which it was wrapped.

  We have already seen that it was luminous.

  This luminosity cannot be seen by daylight [Marie wrote] but it can be easily seen in half-darkness. The light emitted can be strong enough to read by, using a little of the product for light in darkness…

  Nor was this the end of the wonders of radium: it also gave phosphorescence to a large number of bodies incapable of emitting light by their own means.

  Thus with the diamond:

  The diamond is made phosphorescent by the action of radium and can so be distinguished from imitations in paste, which have very weak luminosity.

  And, finally, the radiation of radium was ‘contagious’ – contagious, like a persistent scent or a disease. It was impossible for an object, a plant, an animal or a person to be left near a tube of radium without immediately acquiring a notable ‘activity’ which a sensitive apparatus could detect. This contagion, which interfered with the results of precise experiments, was a daily enemy to Pierre and Marie Curie.

  When one studies strongly radioactive substances [Marie writes], special precautions must be taken if one wishes to be able to continue taking delicate measurements. The various objects used in a chemical laboratory, and those which serve for experiments in physics, all become radioactive in a short time and act upon photographic plates through black paper. Dust, the air of the room, and one’s clothes all become radioactive. The air in the room is a conductor. In the laboratory where we work the evil has reached an acute stage, and we can no longer have any apparatus completely isolated.

  Long after the death of the Curies, their working notebooks were to reveal this mysterious ‘activity’, so that after thirty or forty years the ‘living activity’ would still affect measuring apparatuses.

  The property of radium that attracted most urgent interest was its medical potential. The Curies had noticed that it caused blisters and inflammation of the skin, and Henri Becquerel, carrying a glass tube of radium in his waistcoat pocket, had been badly burned. ‘I love this radium, but I’ve got a grudge against it,’ he complained to the Curies. Pierre studied the effects of radium on animals, and found that by destroying diseased cells it could offer a treatment for growths, tumours, and certain forms of cancer. This therapeutic method was called Curietherapy. Once it was made public, the industrial production of radium began, and clinics opened throughout the world. The Curies could have patented their production technique, and become rich. However they decided it would be ‘contrary to the scientific spirit’. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, but they shunned publicity and continued their simple life-style. Einstein, who knew Mme Curie in later life, said that she was ‘of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted’. After Pierre’s death in a road accident in 1906, she gave the gramme of radium they had prepared together – now worth more than a million gold francs – to her laboratory. One result of this generosity was that her later scientific work was hampered by lack of funds, as an American magazine editor, Mrs William Meloney, discovered when she visited Marie in 1920:

  ‘America’, she said, ‘has about fifty grammes of radium. Four of them are in Baltimore, six in Denver, seven in New York.’ She went on naming the location of every grain.

  ‘And in France?’ I asked.

  ‘My laboratory has hardly more than a gramme.’

  ‘You have only a gramme?’

  ‘I? Oh, I have none. It belongs to my laboratory.’

  … That week I learned that the market price of a gramme of radium was one hundred thousand dollars. I also learned that Mme Curie’s laboratory, although practically a new building, was without sufficient equipment; that the radium held there was only for cancer treatment.

  On her return to the States Mrs Meloney launched a public fund-raising campaign, and in 1921 Mme Curie travelled to New York to collect a gramme of radium, bought for her by the women of America.

  Source: Eve Curie, Madame Curie, trans. Vincent Sheean, London, Heinemann, 1938.

  The Innocence of Radium

  During the First World War the dials of luminous clocks and watches were painted with a phosphorescent radioactive material. The women painters were in the habit of licking their brushes, and many died of cancers of the mouth and associated tissues. These facts lie behind Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem ‘The Innocence of Radium’:

  With a head full of Swiss clockmakers,

  she took a job at a New Jersey factory

  painting luminous numbers, copying the style

  believed to be found in the candlelit backrooms

  of snowbound alpine villages.

  Holding each clockface to the light,

  she would catch a glimpse of the chemist

  as he measured and checked. He was old enough,

  had a kind face and a foreign name

  she never dared to pronounce: Sochocky.

  For a joke she painted her teeth and nails,

  jumped out on the other girls walking home.

  In bed that night she laughed out loud

  and stroked herself with ten green fingertips.

  Unable to sleep, the chemist traced each number

  on the face he had stolen from the factory floor.

  He liked the curve of her eights;

  the way she raised the wet brush to her lips

  and, with a delicate purse of her mouth,

  smoothed the bristle to a perfect tip.

  Over the years he watched her grow dull.

  The doctors gave up, removed half her jaw,

  and blamed syphilis when her thighbone snapped

  as she struggled up a flight of steps.

  Diagnosing infidelity, the chemist pronounced

  the innocence of radium, a kind of radiance

  that could not be held by the body of a woman,

  only caught between her teeth. He was proud

  of his paint and made public speeches

  on how it could be used by artists to convey

  the quality of moonlight. Sochocky displayed

  these shining landscapes on his walls;

  his faith sustained alone in a room

  full of warm skies that broke up the dark

  and drained his blood of its colour.

  His dangerous bones could not keep their secret.

  Laid out f
or X-ray, before a single button was pressed,

  they exposed the plate and pictured themselves

  as a ghost, not a skeleton, a photograph

  he was unable to stop being developed and fixed.

  Source: Lavinia Greenlaw, Night Photograph, London, Faber and Faber, 1993.

  The Secret of the Mosquito’s Stomach

  The solving of the malaria problem has been called the most dramatic episode in the history of medicine. Malaria had for centuries been the most common infective disease throughout the tropics, but its cause was unknown. Because it was common in swampy districts, it was thought to be due to poisonous emanations from marshes. The first step towards understanding came in 1880 when a French army doctor, Alphonse Laveran, observing a drop of blood from a malaria patient under the microscope, saw minute parasites living on the red corpuscles. How these entered the bloodstream remained a mystery until the Englishman Ronald Ross proved that they were transmitted by mosquitoes.

  Ross (1857–1932) was the son of an Indian Army General. He wanted to be a writer, but was persuaded by his father to take up medicine. After qualifying, he entered the Indian Medical Service, but in his spare time he studied literature, taking up French, Italian and German, and writing poems, music, dramas and novels. Deeply moved by the misery and disease of rural India, which he described in his poetry, he determined to solve the malaria problem. His guru was Patrick Manson, the ‘father of tropical medicine’, whom he met in London in 1894. While working in China, Manson had shown that the parasite that causes elephantiasis in humans grew and developed inside the mosquito. One November afternoon, walking down Oxford Street with Ross, Manson remarked, ‘Do you know, I have formed the theory that mosquitoes carry malaria.’

  To test this hypothesis Ross began systematic research after his return to India, collecting and breeding mosquitoes, feeding them on the blood of malaria patients, dissecting them, and examining their organs microscopically. He received no help or encouragement from the authorities, British or Indian, who saw no value in his work, and he met with many failures since he was experimenting, at first, on the wrong (i.e. non-malaria carrying) species of mosquito.

  In April 1897, while holidaying with his wife at Ootacamund, he visited a well-known malarial area, the Sigur Ghat, which was half an hour’s cycle ride away. During his investigations there he was himself infected with malaria, and discovered a type of mosquito new to him (probably Anopheles stephensi), which he called the ‘dapple-winged’ or Type C (to distinguish it from Types A and B on which he had already worked).

  As Ross relates below, the breakthrough came on 20 August 1897, after his return to work at Secunderabad, when he noticed the characteristic pigmented egg cells of the malaria parasite in the stomach of this dapple-winged species. The following year he found further stages of parasite development in the salivary glands of mosquitoes, and it became clear that malaria was transmitted by the mosquito bite.

  Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1902, and in 1926 the Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases at Putney Heath was founded in his honour by public subscription. He died in 1932. His last words were: ‘I shall find out things, yes, yes!’ On the sixtieth anniversary of his discovery his close friend John Masefield, by then Poet Laureate, published a commemorative poem in The Times (20 August 1957):

  Once on this August day, an exiled man

  Striving to read the hieroglyphics spelled

  By changing speckles upon glass, beheld

  A secret hidden since the world began.

  I will try to reconstruct the events as exactly as I can out of my notebooks, letters and memories. On arrival at Secunderabad after the severe labour in Ootacamund I felt my first violent reaction against the microscope and could scarcely bring myself to look through mine for a month. The Great Monsoon seemed to have failed. The hot blast which, instead of it, struck us in June was followed by a suffocating stillness and the sky was filled with a haze of dust through which the sun glared like a foiled enchanter … Well do I remember those awful days – and nights. I spent the time doing almost nothing but (I believe) writing – or rather moulding in the mind – the stanzas of In Exile, Part VII:

  What ails the solitude?

  Is this the Judgement Day?

  The sky is red as blood;

  The very rocks decay

  And crack and crumble, and

  There is a flame of wind

  Wherewith the burning sand

  Is ever mass’d and thin’d …

  The world is white with heat;

  The world is rent and riven;

  The world and heavens meet;

  The lost stars cry in heav’n.

  I do not boast my premonitions because they seldom come true! But at that time I was certainly much exalted in spirit and said to myself: ‘One more effort and the thing will be done.’ I remember especially a dreadful evening when I climbed one of the heaps of great boulders piled upon each other which dot the plain outside the station and saw the vulture and the dead jackal (mentioned in the poem) below. Then it was that the thought struck me: Why not see whether mosquitoes, fed on malaria blood as before, contain any of the mosquito parasites which I had found in the Sigur Ghat? I was at full work again on 21 July 1897 on the last lap … But the weather became very hot again in August. At first I toiled comfortably, but as failure followed failure I became exasperated and worked till I could hardly see my way home late in the afternoons. Well do I remember that dark, hot little office in the hospital at Begumpett with the necessary gleam of light coming in from under the eaves of the veranda. I did not allow the punka to be used because it blew about my dissected mosquitoes, which were partly examined without a cover glass, and the result was that swarms of flies and of ‘eye flies’ – minute little insects which try to get into one’s ears and eyelids – tormented me at their pleasure, while an occasional stegomyia [mosquito] revenged herself on me for the death of her friends. The screws of my microscope were rusted with sweat from my forehead and hands and its last remaining eyepiece was cracked!

  By 15 August 31 mosquitoes of types A and B, all bred from the larva and fed on malarial patients, had been scrupulously examined, not counting numerous unfed mosquitoes, bad dissections, partial dissections, and other studies … On the previous day I had written to my wife: ‘I have failed in finding parasites in mosquitoes fed on malaria patients, but perhaps am not using the proper kind of mosquito.’ Now, as if in answer, some Angel of Fate must have met one of my three ‘mosquito men’ [Indians hired by Ross to look for mosquitoes – adults and larvae] in his leisurely perambulations and must have put into his hand a bottle of mosquito larvae, some of which I saw at once were of a type different from the usual culex and stegomyia larvae. Next morning, the 16 August, when I went again to hospital after breakfast the hospital assistant (I regret I have forgotten his name) pointed out a small mosquito seated on the wall with its tail sticking outwards. I caught it by my method of placing the mouth of a bottle slowly over it – if one jabs the bottle quickly the insect always escapes sideways – and killed it with tobacco smoke. It had spots on the wings and was evidently like the insect which I had found in the rest house at Sigur and is described in my notebook as ‘a brown mosquito, not brindled, with three black bars on wings caught in ward’. I dissected it at once and found nothing unusual; but while I was doing so – I remember the details well – the worthy hospital assistant ran in to say that there were a number of mosquitoes of the same class which had hatched out in the bottle that my men had brought me yesterday. Sure enough there they were: about a dozen big brown fellows, with fine tapered bodies and spotted wings, hungrily trying to escape through the gauze covering of the flask which the Angel of Fate had given to my humbler retainer – dappled-winged mosquitoes, type C, the first I had ever found in Secunderabad but larger than the one I had just caught on the wall. Immediately my patient, Husein Khan [a malaria sufferer, paid to feed mosquitoes with his blood] was stripped and put on the b
ed under the mosquito net. This was at 12.25 P. m. by my notebook; and in five minutes 10 of the new mosquitoes had gorged themselves on him and were caught by the hospital assistant, each in its separate test tube with a drop of water to drink and a loose lump of cotton wool to prevent escape – Husein Khan received one anna for each …

  Next day, 17 August, two of my new beauties (Anopheles stephensi) were dead, but I dissected two of the survivors, mosquitoes 32 and 33. They are described in my notebook as ‘large, legs, proboscis, and anterior border of wings spotted dark brown and white – brown spots on tail joint of body. Back of abdomen and thorax light brown, belly dark brown. Wings nearly white.’ I was rather excited over the dissections, spoiled them, and found nothing …

  The 20 August 1897 – the anniversary of which I always call Mosquito Day – was, I think, a cloudy, dull, hot day. I went to hospital at 7 a.m., examined my patients and attended to official correspondence but was much annoyed because my men had failed to bring any more larvae of the dappled-winged mosquitoes and still more because one of my three remaining anopheles had died during the night and had swelled up with decay. After a hurried breakfast at the mess I returned to dissect the cadaver (mosquito 36) but found nothing new in it. I then examined a small stegomyia which happened to have been fed on Husein Khan on the same day (the 16th) – mosquito 37 – which was also negative of course. At about 1 p.m. I determined to sacrifice the seventh anopheles (Anopheles stephensi) of the batch fed on the 16th, mosquito 37, although my eyesight was already fatigued. Only one more of the batch remained.

  The dissection was excellent and I went carefully through the tissues, now so familiar to me, searching every micron with the same passion and care as one would search some vast ruined palace for a little hidden treasure. Nothing. No, these new mosquitoes also were going to be a failure: there was something wrong with the theory. But the stomach tissue still remained to be examined – lying there empty and flaccid before me on the glass slide, a great white expanse of cells like a large courtyard of flagstones, each one of which must be scrutinized – half an hour’s labour at least. I was tired and what was the use? I must have examined the stomachs of a thousand mosquitoes by this time. But the Angel of Fate fortunately laid his hand on my head and I had scarcely commenced the search again when I saw a clear and almost perfectly circular outline before me of about 12 μm in diameter. The outline was much too sharp, the cell too small to be an ordinary stomach cell of a mosquito. I looked a little further. Here was another, and another exactly similar cell.