Nearly 30 years later, I finally have some idea of how Marie Curie worked with our scientists as part of her leadership role in international radiation measurements and standards. In 2015, NIST made a decision to dispose of these three standards as hazardous radioactive waste. 6, containing 20.28 milligrams of radium chloride, was delivered to the National Bureau of Standards, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Marie Curie calibrated these secondary standards against her primary standard.
Scientists urgently needed such standards to support their studies of radioactivity, so the Czech/Austrian chemist Otto Hönigschmid was asked to prepare a set of seven secondary standards. She agreed, on the advice of Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford, that this international standard would not be kept in her Paris laboratory, but would instead be stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres in the Paris suburbs. In 1910, she was asked by her peers to prepare the world’s first radium standard: a glass ampoule containing 21.99 milligrams of radium chloride, whose mass and radioactivity had been carefully measured. Searching through my new laboratories, I found a framed 1921 photograph of Marie Curie from The Pittsburgh Sun on top of an old file cabinet and started to wonder: What was her connection to NIST, and why did my predecessors save this photograph? In 1988, I took over the Dosimetry Group, which maintains national standards for radiation doses from sources including radium. I came to NIST in 1972 and worked for 15 years in the Radioactivity Group, which maintains the national standards for radioactivity, including the standard for radium in solutions. None of NIST’s recorded histories mentions Marie Curie, which I find a strange oversight.
Very little note, however, has been made of her leadership role in the development of radioactivity standards. Major motion pictures and best-selling biographies have chronicled her discovery of the radioactive elements polonium and radium, for which she shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903 and then received a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, in 1911. Marie Curie is perhaps the most famous woman of 20th-century science.
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