“And that’s why I’m saying Marie Curie is overrated,” says Know-it-all.
“I’m not following. What’s your argument? And why are you picking on poor dead Marie?” I ask.
“I think what she accomplished wasn’t by any special brilliance, just some drudgery. What’d she do, after all, but find a needle in a haystack, some radium in some pitchblende? I’ll grant that she might have worked hard, but, hey, she died from what she processed. That doesn’t seem to be very smart, not scientist-smart.”
“But you’re not looking at the big picture, at the context,” I counter.
“What context. That she was a woman who won two Nobel prizes?” asks Know-it-all.
“No, no, no. You’re not looking at the context of her life. It isn’t that she is a woman that she was a great scientist. It’s what she did in the context of her time. And that she died from her ‘invention’ is part of the context. There are plenty of similar examples, some of which would put you under the same critical glass through which you view Marie Sklowdowska Curie, famous recipient of two Nobel prizes, co-discoverer of radium, and hard-working scientist. I’m no expert on either her life or times, but I do know that she’s the one who isolated radium and that she did so in a context of type of ignorance we all at times share: Ignorance imposed by the unknown.
“And my saying ‘at times’ is significant. Marie’s discovery of radium eventually led to the use of the element in watch dials, applied as a luminous paint. Just gotta know what time it is day AND night, don’t we? So, watches with self-luminous dials were very popular; popular, that is, until sufficient information about their dangers irradiated the brains of officials who declared them hazardous. Sometime around the 1950s those warnings changed the watch-makers’ paints to safer materials bound to phosphor, but the general public, however, kept wearing the watches they had, oblivious to their dangers. Who knows? You might have one of those old watches lying among Great Grandpa’s effects in some old drawer or trunk in the attic, that is, lying around and accumulating radon gas you will release into your nostrils when you open the drawer or take the lid off the storage box. Doesn’t that make you ignorant? Why do you keep it in the house?
“In the context of general ignorance about radiation during the first half of the twentieth century, wearing a watch with glowing numbers and hands was fashionable for civilians and practical for soldiers during nighttime operations. What we don’t know never illuminates our minds. That people wore radium on their wrists seems to the scientifically astute a foolish practice. But all actions occur in a context. Think of Marie. She worked to isolate radium and thorium, and she worked very hard. But her work led to her early demise by aplastic anemia, caused, no doubt, by her years of work with radioactive materials in a lab not designed to protect Marie. Again, context is everything when we want to understand the consequences of any action and the lives of others. Remember, no one had any experience with radium before Marie. She writes, ‘We were very poorly equipped with facilities for this purpose. It was necessary to subject large quantities of ore to careful chemical treatment. We had no money, no suitable laboratory, no personal help for our great and difficult undertaking. It was like creating something out of nothing.’ *
“Not exactly nothing, of course, that would make Marie a deity. Rather, she went to the uranium plant at St. Joachimsthal, figured that radium was left “in the residues, and, with the permission of the Austrian government, which owned the plant…succeeded in securing…these residues, then quite valueless,--and used them for the extraction of uranium. How glad I was when the sacks arrived, with the brown dust mixed with pine needles…Some time later, the Austrian government…let us have several tons of similar residues at a low price.”
“Let’s add to the context of wearing those radium-bearing watches. When the United States tested atomic bombs in Nevada—yes, if you are too young to remember: open air blasts—people—probably many of them wearing watches with radium dials—gathered to watch from Las Vegas and in front of their black-and-white TVs. The Atomic Age seemed to be one of great promise and at that same time a step into the unknown, as many science fiction books and films detailed with their monstrous creatures that were formed by radiation. So, there was ignorance about ionizing radiation (I suspect there still is) and what it does to the body. Even Marie, a great scientist, found out the hard way.
“And her discovery, radium, led to the deaths of others, not as a purposeful act, but as a consequence of using radium paint. Asian women, working to apply the paint to the watch dials, for example, twisted the bristles of their brushes in their mouths to tighten them, and then dipped their fine points into the paint, repeatedly: Not a good thing, but in the context of not knowing, an action they performed without intention to self-harm. Like Marie, many of those dial-painters suffered from some disease caused by their exposure to radium. And probably a number of people who wore those watches had unexplained episodes with cancer of some kind. It wasn’t until the world was generally aware of radiation’s dangers that we stopped making those watch dials and stopped open-air nuclear testing.
“I suppose we can make an analog of our experience with radium in our experience with the thousands of chemicals we have invented, some of them seeming wondrous at first, only to have their dangers exposed with increased exposure. Hexachlorophene, for example. For a while, it was in some form in almost every medicine cabinet. Dial soap contained it. Once again, think context. In ignorance of hexachlorophene’s dangers, the public was persuaded to use products that contained the chemical for various reasons, including the treatment of acne. In ignorance, the public used it without intention to self-harm. It wasn’t until after some 50 deaths attributed to hexachlorophene’s effects on brains that the light bulb idea of banning the substance illuminated the minds of the FDA and its counterparts in other countries.
“The consequence of almost everything we do explains why we acted the way we did, why we made, for example, mistakes we would not in hindsight make again. Unfortunately, contexts are often too big to see, just as we can’t see the whole universe that contains us. The contexts in which we operate daily are often obscure. And our inability to see the entire contexts of our actions and the actions of others makes ignorance commonplace, produces unintended consequences, and too often ends in tragic decisions.
“Think, today, of the contexts for your thoughts and actions. Can you really see the big picture? Is the big picture you think you see not somehow limited by the unknown? Your life must of necessity be a continuous pursuit of understanding contexts. The extent to which you fail to understand the unknown is the extent to which you find yourself in jeopardy of some kind or to which you misjudge the lives and motives of others.”
*Curie, Marie. Pierre Curie, trans. by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg, 1923.
“I’m not following. What’s your argument? And why are you picking on poor dead Marie?” I ask.
“I think what she accomplished wasn’t by any special brilliance, just some drudgery. What’d she do, after all, but find a needle in a haystack, some radium in some pitchblende? I’ll grant that she might have worked hard, but, hey, she died from what she processed. That doesn’t seem to be very smart, not scientist-smart.”
“But you’re not looking at the big picture, at the context,” I counter.
“What context. That she was a woman who won two Nobel prizes?” asks Know-it-all.
“No, no, no. You’re not looking at the context of her life. It isn’t that she is a woman that she was a great scientist. It’s what she did in the context of her time. And that she died from her ‘invention’ is part of the context. There are plenty of similar examples, some of which would put you under the same critical glass through which you view Marie Sklowdowska Curie, famous recipient of two Nobel prizes, co-discoverer of radium, and hard-working scientist. I’m no expert on either her life or times, but I do know that she’s the one who isolated radium and that she did so in a context of type of ignorance we all at times share: Ignorance imposed by the unknown.
“And my saying ‘at times’ is significant. Marie’s discovery of radium eventually led to the use of the element in watch dials, applied as a luminous paint. Just gotta know what time it is day AND night, don’t we? So, watches with self-luminous dials were very popular; popular, that is, until sufficient information about their dangers irradiated the brains of officials who declared them hazardous. Sometime around the 1950s those warnings changed the watch-makers’ paints to safer materials bound to phosphor, but the general public, however, kept wearing the watches they had, oblivious to their dangers. Who knows? You might have one of those old watches lying among Great Grandpa’s effects in some old drawer or trunk in the attic, that is, lying around and accumulating radon gas you will release into your nostrils when you open the drawer or take the lid off the storage box. Doesn’t that make you ignorant? Why do you keep it in the house?
“In the context of general ignorance about radiation during the first half of the twentieth century, wearing a watch with glowing numbers and hands was fashionable for civilians and practical for soldiers during nighttime operations. What we don’t know never illuminates our minds. That people wore radium on their wrists seems to the scientifically astute a foolish practice. But all actions occur in a context. Think of Marie. She worked to isolate radium and thorium, and she worked very hard. But her work led to her early demise by aplastic anemia, caused, no doubt, by her years of work with radioactive materials in a lab not designed to protect Marie. Again, context is everything when we want to understand the consequences of any action and the lives of others. Remember, no one had any experience with radium before Marie. She writes, ‘We were very poorly equipped with facilities for this purpose. It was necessary to subject large quantities of ore to careful chemical treatment. We had no money, no suitable laboratory, no personal help for our great and difficult undertaking. It was like creating something out of nothing.’ *
“Not exactly nothing, of course, that would make Marie a deity. Rather, she went to the uranium plant at St. Joachimsthal, figured that radium was left “in the residues, and, with the permission of the Austrian government, which owned the plant…succeeded in securing…these residues, then quite valueless,--and used them for the extraction of uranium. How glad I was when the sacks arrived, with the brown dust mixed with pine needles…Some time later, the Austrian government…let us have several tons of similar residues at a low price.”
“Let’s add to the context of wearing those radium-bearing watches. When the United States tested atomic bombs in Nevada—yes, if you are too young to remember: open air blasts—people—probably many of them wearing watches with radium dials—gathered to watch from Las Vegas and in front of their black-and-white TVs. The Atomic Age seemed to be one of great promise and at that same time a step into the unknown, as many science fiction books and films detailed with their monstrous creatures that were formed by radiation. So, there was ignorance about ionizing radiation (I suspect there still is) and what it does to the body. Even Marie, a great scientist, found out the hard way.
“And her discovery, radium, led to the deaths of others, not as a purposeful act, but as a consequence of using radium paint. Asian women, working to apply the paint to the watch dials, for example, twisted the bristles of their brushes in their mouths to tighten them, and then dipped their fine points into the paint, repeatedly: Not a good thing, but in the context of not knowing, an action they performed without intention to self-harm. Like Marie, many of those dial-painters suffered from some disease caused by their exposure to radium. And probably a number of people who wore those watches had unexplained episodes with cancer of some kind. It wasn’t until the world was generally aware of radiation’s dangers that we stopped making those watch dials and stopped open-air nuclear testing.
“I suppose we can make an analog of our experience with radium in our experience with the thousands of chemicals we have invented, some of them seeming wondrous at first, only to have their dangers exposed with increased exposure. Hexachlorophene, for example. For a while, it was in some form in almost every medicine cabinet. Dial soap contained it. Once again, think context. In ignorance of hexachlorophene’s dangers, the public was persuaded to use products that contained the chemical for various reasons, including the treatment of acne. In ignorance, the public used it without intention to self-harm. It wasn’t until after some 50 deaths attributed to hexachlorophene’s effects on brains that the light bulb idea of banning the substance illuminated the minds of the FDA and its counterparts in other countries.
“The consequence of almost everything we do explains why we acted the way we did, why we made, for example, mistakes we would not in hindsight make again. Unfortunately, contexts are often too big to see, just as we can’t see the whole universe that contains us. The contexts in which we operate daily are often obscure. And our inability to see the entire contexts of our actions and the actions of others makes ignorance commonplace, produces unintended consequences, and too often ends in tragic decisions.
“Think, today, of the contexts for your thoughts and actions. Can you really see the big picture? Is the big picture you think you see not somehow limited by the unknown? Your life must of necessity be a continuous pursuit of understanding contexts. The extent to which you fail to understand the unknown is the extent to which you find yourself in jeopardy of some kind or to which you misjudge the lives and motives of others.”
*Curie, Marie. Pierre Curie, trans. by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg, 1923.
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