"To Madame Curie:
One Gram of Radium"

JOHN HOHENBERG

IN PARIS, in the spring of 1920, everything seemed possible.
The war to end all war had been won. The League of
Nations was meeting for the first time in Geneva. A con¬
ference on the limitation of armaments was but a year off in
Washington, D. C, and a bold figure in science, Albert Einstein,
was being talked of for a Nobel Prize. It was a time for great
dreams, great achievements, seemingly a turning point in man¬
kind's long struggle for a better world.

In such an atmosphere of hope that spring a gentle American
visitor came to see Alme. Curie at her cluttered office in the
Radium Institute in Paris and asked her impulsively: "If you had
the whole world to choose from, what would you take?"

The world-famous scientist, a frail little woman in a black
cotton dress, replied without hesitation, "I need a gram of radium
to continue my researches but I cannot buy it. Radium is too dear
for me."

The American visitor. Airs. William Brown Meloney, was
thunder-struck. The discoverer of radium, who had been honored
with a Nobel Prize for her achievements, owned none of it and
there was but a gram in her entire laboratory. She had no patents,
no revenue. She had given her remarkable discovery to the world.

Then and there, Mrs. Meloney decided that Alme. Curie would

Author's Note: For this account, I am indebted to Eve Curie's biog¬
raphy of her mother, Mme. Curie, and to contemporary periodicals.

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