systems and whatnot and watch them building that in real time even as you see progress come off of the official record, you see it grow at the root of where it where it's needed most. so i find a lot of joy in that. thank you. everybody. please thank me. brooklyn and randall's. we will be going over the author signing tent, which is very conveniently located to the parnassus book tent. if you have not bought either of bookso.

i honored to introduce dava sobel. all of you divas. the author of several and bestselling books, including galileo's daughter and longitude a book, the accompanied me on an eight hour trip back to my home province from the capital city of manila back in the philippines. so it's a it's a great book she is the recipient of the individual public service award, the national science board, the bradford washburn award, the cook robert's award, the astronomical society of the pacific and a guggenheim fellowship among, other honors. she was a former york times science reporter and currently editor of the meter poetry column scientific american. tonight, she will be about her new book, the elements of marie curie how the glow of radium lit a path for women in science. in this profound and

illuminating biography of marie curie, david not only writes about her numerous contributions to science, but also about the many trailblazing women who followed her path. she will be in conversation. linda voss recently retired from nasa. linda wrote reports for congress and wrote policy managing spaceflight and for avoiding collision collisions in low earth orbit. she has written spoken about space for several publications including aerospace america and astra magazine. wrote about endangered soil species for lancaster farming and other environmental topics on her substack ink land star that's substack dot. everyone let us all dava sobel and linda voss linda voss.

hello? can you hear me? yes, very good. i am really happy to see all of you here on. this dark, cold, rainy night. thank you for coming to politics and prose which as read jamie raskin put it, is the center of enlightenment and resistance and freedom through our times. you're here. thank you for hosting us. i flew from indiana to meet with darva because she is of the most significant science writers of our time, a world class intellect and even more lovely human. she has opened the doors of the human side of extraordinary science stories to a new generation or two or three, and made us all literate. and to get my copies signed. of course. aside from that, she is bringing to light important and contribution gains made by women to the scientific.

a few additional fun facts about diva. correct me if i'm wrong on this. she's an amateur astronomer and an eclipse chaser. she even has a star named after her as well as her book. she's written a play about, copernicus, and for the last five years, she's been the poetry editor for scientific american, a position she and created. so get that right. her latest book is shows a master at work. she is a person of all narrative that could be the plot of a spy novel with arc of scientific collaborate ation that could be a mystery novel its own right. and she puts it all into an accessible context that illuminates the human story behind our conception of the basis of matter. today. that's pretty amazing. wow. i'm impressed.

so i'd like to start with what you to the subject of marie curie and. what does the dava sobel add to the body of knowledge of this extraordinary woman. so i'm very late coming to the issue of women science because for a long time i didn't realize it was an issue and i i got my awakening while writing the previous book the glass universe, which is about a group of women astronomer, was at the harvard observatory. and i found myself being repeatedly surprised by what they had done. i chose to tell the story because i knew they'd made really important discoveries. but then when i was watching them make the discoveries, i kept kept being surprised.

i finally had to admit that i had come to them with embarrassingly low expectations. and that despite my upbringing, my mother was a scientist who had lot of role models. i still and i should say never as as a young girl interested in science i never had anybody try to, discourage me or tell me. i wasn't smart enough or that it didn't belong. at the bronx high of science, even though the boys outnumber the girls by 4 to 1. and yet i hadn't to escape negative attitudes about that were just in the air when i was growing up the 1950s. and i thought, wow, i have i

have this kind of undying, diagnosed, latent misogyny. and if i have it when, then the only thing that was worse than discovery was discovering, i wasn't alone. so one of the people had asked to read. that book is a technical expert was alissa goodman at harvard, who she has a named in astronomy. and as soon as she started it, she apologized, said, i'm not really going to be paying attention to the science explanations because i'm gobsmacked by these women and and here am at harvard i, i know this i know all their names but i always thought it was something cute or quaint. i never realized they were actually doing science. so there it was again.

and i saw it. and i wonder how widespread this misogyny is and i think after last tuesday we have our answer. so i i really wanted to focus on stories about women in science and my editor immediately suggested a biography of madame curie and. i said no, i don't want to do that. i already read a biography about her and i don't have anything new to say. so we let it go. and then i was asked to review book called women in element, which was a collection of about five essays about women. and of course, curie was one of the topics. and her daughter iran was another and i think i recognized

one other name in the table. contents. but then as i read the book madame curie, whose name kept up in the other descriptions so someone had come from norway to work with her. someone else used, a very fancy british scholarship to go to paris and be madam curie's lab. and by about the fifth or sixth one, it really started to look like a network. so i got in touch with the curie museum in paris and they had records of about 45 women who had passed through her lab. so i called the editor right away. i said, i have something new to say about madame curie. you know, might have started by asking people name a woman scientist, but i don't want to

put people on the spot. usually what happens is they name madam curie? may be two or three others come up but. and here in washington, maybe we could come up with 15 without even. but there's this sense. she was the only one. and she's the most one. but that was when i really to say yes. she was never the only one and she didn't want be the only one. and probably she remains most famous because her astounding achievements, including two nobel prizes. one in physics and one in chemistry. and to this day, she is the only ever to have done that to nobels into. two fields of science, right?

right. i guess don't won the peace prize. right. and the chemistry producing. chemistry, linus. so a woman of high achievement. and i know that you wrote a piece about the message women today. could you talk little bit about, you know? not not just her messages for women scientists, but maybe a larger story of her life and what that means for in this moment, perhaps. yeah. her life was larger than in many ways. she she started out in poland where it was illegal for young women to attend university. so she got herself to. and although she was intending to go back to poland and improve the lives of her fellow. she fell in love with pierre and said it was a grief to her to

have to remain forever in paris. but she she decided to do that and and she was working on her doctoral dissertation a about these strange new ways that came from uranium and while she was doing that work, it became she had the sense that there was there was some undiscovered elements that behaved the same way. and pierre dropped what he was doing to join. and they discovered new elements, polonium and radium. and there work in this new field of radioactivity, which was her word won them. the 1903 nobel prize in physics. and then very soon after that, pierre was in an accident and

she was chosen by the faculty at the university of paris to take over the laboratory where they had worked together and to step into pierre teaching responsibilities teaches physics course. so that her the first woman ever to at this ancient university. and now she was triply world famous because she was the first woman to win a nobel prize in any category. and now she has directorship of a laboratory. and she's on the faculty so women were drawn to her. she was she was a magnet. was also a mother. so as a widow, she had to bear young daughters. and fortunately her her father in law who was a widower, moved

in to take care of the children so she could go to work work. the statistic today in this country is 40% of women scientists drop out when have a child. so she had a lot of families support always. and but you ask why important today? i is one of the most surprising things to me in. the course of writing this book was how many people would would respond to the subject by saying oh, she's hero. but you know, not just women, not just scientists but all sorts of of people. and. it's her her resilience, her her attitude, her her refusal give

up. i think one of the most surprising things that i discovered was the way she responded to the outbreak of the first world war, which was to say, oh, this is the first time that x-rays will be available on the battlefield. so she outfitted she got someone to give her a car. she didn't know how to drive, but she learned and outfitted this man with x-ray and drove to the front and then she she created a six week crash course, which she offered to anyone any woman was a citizen literate to come take this class. and she taught them about electricity and x-rays and human anatomy. and then 150 of them went out

and did that same vital work. so so i'm going to just emphasize she also had to convince the surgeons who were taking the bullets that this was a viable technology, right? yes. i mean, she was unstoppable, right. in some senses. yeah. the x-ray technology was so new that a lot of doctors hadn't seen it in use. so she had to she had to prove its its worth. very inspirational. i think that nonstop ability is a good this is a good moment in time to she was a good companion through the pandemic and and she's she's really helping me now through this time. yeah i mean i'm i wasn't going to ask this. i wasn't going to ask this question. but cancer niki wrote in her new york times book review characterizing madame curie a

martyr for science. and i wanted ask you about your reaction to that. do you think that's in some sense, true or not, an accurate characterization. i think it is in some sense true. and i i was so interested in the way kate zernike approached my book. she she had such a gloomy attitude about women science. so i read her book. the exceptions and it's it's excellent. but the her story is all about who really got burned whose work was stolen and it's very disturbed. so i understand now how she how she came to the women my story and intended to focus on the more negative parts think she talked about.

ellen glad it's the one from norway as saying how x years after her work curie, they still hadn't made her a full professor, but they did make her a full professor eventually and. so her hers really a success story is that is that enough about that you know reviews are so strange. i've been told by a by a wise person, if you come out alive. that's good. yeah. well, back to the process. could you tell us a little about your research on the book that places that you went and some of discovered sources that were the most important or tori for your book. yeah. so of i was planning to go to pray to paris. it wouldn't have been a grave to me to do work at the curie and the national library and then the pandemic happened and nobody

was going anywhere. but great thing was that because matt, i'm curious who she is everything of hers has been digitized including the the journal of her grief that she kept for a year after her husband's death. you can read the whole handwritten thing online. she kept a notebook of the developmental milestones. her daughter's. her lab notebooks are digitized and the entire centuries of the proceedings of the french academy of sciences there are weekly public session. you can read you can read it all. so so that was that was a great help. and i, i don't french but but i

can it. so that's great and i think you had mentioned that there is some things that maybe don't exist anymore that you were able. yes. in the first biography of madame curie, which was written by her daughter as in the 1930s, they were letters in in polish that the daughter had translated quoted in her biography and. probably those letters don't exist anymore because. of the second world war. i'm going to just dig into a little bit more. there is a particular scene that comes from those unpublished sources that i thought was pretty telling the book. oh, the silkworms. yeah. oh, okay. yeah. so i read if curie's biography of her mother in french and english and and they are

identical, except one letter that appears in the french version that think was accidentally left of the english because it was the best one of all. and she it when she was very ill. she had a lot of illness through her life part of it from radio and x-ray exposure but also just she she she probably a tuberculosis carrier and she said she had various kidney problems. so she she spent than a year as an invalid and during that her daughters were raised in silkworm caterpillars and she would watch them. and she said that sometimes she she thought of herself one of those caterpillars that she didn't know what compelled her to do her work. and she thought maybe maybe some

the silkworms would never metamorphose and and do what they were meant to do and maybe she would would never complete the work that that she was meant to do but all she knew was she she had to keep it. and i think that's really cool. and i think that english translator is still kicking himself for not including letter. i don't i cannot explain. so you have also achieved a high level of in your own work to the perhaps aspiring science writers out there. what are your secrets? what's the what's writing process? a day in the life? do you sketch out what you're going to write in detail or do you just jump into the material and see where it leads you? a little of both. i think the the the advice i would give is to find out the

time of day that for you and to work at that time of day and and try to protect it from from the busy work that all have to do, like. how do you evolve the structure of your story. and i also want to ask you about what inspired the chapter names. okay. at first, the structure was going to be the women. each one was going to walk on stage and have her story. but it didn't work. and and i know it didn't work because i showed the first five chapters to my editor and. he told me, this isn't working. so he said, you really you

really need to focus on madame curie. it's it's her story. and she brings everybody else in and this is the kind of thing that happens to me. so the reason i made that choice was that i had read all the existing biographies. madame curie, by the end of time, i thought, well, everybody knows that, you know, because it's out there forgetting that not everybody knows that. so, so that was so then the story had a very natural. it's her life. that's that's the story. and and it's not. it's not typical biography and that it's not an exhaustive exploration of her life. it doesn't have every detail because it's it's interested in these other women. so it's her story only insofar

as she ties all the others together. and the chapter inspiration chapters. so early on, i had the thought especially when it was going to be just about the women was to name chapter for one of the women but there were a lot of other people in her life who were very helpful to her. and i wound up naming some of the chapters for them to. she said she had very good in her life, her older brother, her father were tremendously encouraging to her, always. her husband, her father in law, the people who the men who worked in the lab, she really had a very good support network of and women and. so somebody my name is at the head of every chapter most of them are women's names.

and then there's also an element that has something to do with either the person in that chapter or or what they're doing. so. so it's a little puzzle, a little, little guessing game. i just like to say it's very warm in here. so i see people kind of. all right. if anybody needs or anything about it, it's him kind of sad or, you know, i. i personally really love the science story. i knew about niels bohr. i knew about mendelssohn, the periodic table. you know, einstein comes in and i just had to put all the pieces, all the different players and how all contributed to. putting pieces of this big puzzle together then exploded into new concept of the atom and

the basis of matter. so yeah, this is really a science story. there's a lot science in this book and i apologize for that. i'm really proud that i was able to pull together and. does what they actually did in the lab. i thought it was crucial talk about and what the state of physics and chemistry was at the start and what part she played in what was really a second scientific revolution. and starting in 1911, there were elite high level physics meetings were invitation only just the top people. the world would get invited. discuss this new idea. and she was in room for two decades. the only woman the room.

what's starting 1911 was until 1933 that there were two other women included and one of them was her daughter. so on that theme. so of late in your books, glass universe, galileo's daughter. you've embraced the stories, the untold stories of women in science. and so i wanted to dig a little bit more into your background. you've mentioned the bronx high school. you went to your support. could you talk about your fascination with the history of. science tests, work science progress and your background? again why this is really you write these stories your experience writing about science as a woman. yeah so i have always been interested science and as i, i

was not discouraged from that interest but also couldn't really see myself as a bench. i took a lot of lab courses in school and i liked them. but i, i just couldn't see it. and i always loved to and i got a lot of encourage judgment about my writing and i if somebody had suggest science writing to me when i was in high school or college it would have saved me a lot of grief because i was really lost soul and i had, i think five majors at three different schools. and it wasn't till after i finally finished that i fell backward into a job at a newspaper. the year of the first earth day.

so i was hired on the women's, which meant had complete freedom. choose my topics and so that was earth pollution, conservation and genetic counseling was new thing. that was interesting and it was science writing. but i still didn't know. that's what you called it i was just happy and and then moved to ithaca where at cornell had a job in their news bureau a science writer. and i was able to get that job when carl sagan, frank drake, hans-peter were all the faculty. and i could interview them and, write about what they were doing and that job was a a second

university education. it really was fantastic. and i've worked freelance a lot again, always writing science. and i was for a couple of years at the times where the job i supposed to do was general assignment science, writing, technology and at the last minute they they changed to writing about psychology and psychiatry about about which i knew little. this is just to tell you don't believe you read in the newspaper you know, just just because you get the byline doesn't mean you're really expert and that was that was terribly stressful. yes. oh and they one of the things they did was volunteer as a

human subject in a research project that was interesting. so so yeah, it was it was a singular and informative. but i prefer being a former reporter for the new york times and and i really didn't think i would write books. and longitude actually out as a magazine story, which i had a lot of trouble selling. it took me almost a year to sell that idea. i knew that conference was coming up. i appealed to all the magazines, was writing for everybody turned me down, and then at the last minute, harvard magazine, because conference was happening there and somebody found out that alistair cooke was going to be the conference speaker, so

suddenly they felt it might be worth covering this meeting. so it appeared as a cover story in magazine and then the unlikely thing of all, a book published here called and said, i think i think that story would an interesting book to enough to. so after year of this failed proposal for a magazine story it was a book overnight and yeah i'm still still kind of reeling from from getting to be the one to be able to tell that story because it had been it been told as a chapter in this or that book about mapmaking or something else but. here we are and we had that nice introduction from somebody read the book on a on a bus in the philippines. so wonderful.

good luck is maybe part of that. could you talk a little bit about potential mentors, influences that you drew from your career and or who helped and supported? yeah. so my mother was a scientist. her sister was not a scientist, but a great and her name is ruth gruber. and my my cousins are her children are up here. happy to happy to have you all. so she was an influence. she was a wife a mother and a writer and traveled a lot. and i thought traveling around writing stories about science would be an ideal existence and and for a while i wrote a column for discover magazine called field notes which was really a

happy place where i would just ask scientists if i could follow around for a few days and write about what they did because for most people most people have no idea what it means to be doing research it just is just a vague term. everybody knows that it goes on that's what scientists do. they do research but what what does that come down to and that really turns out to be interesting be able to give a granular to day by day you know if you're studying lightning that was one group i followed and they had various recording boxes and cameras set up and various sites around florida and they'd have to go round and collect the data go out in thunderstorms and yeah group

yeah. so and telling stories trying to. because science just does not palatable to a lot of people it and it's still it's odd that in this culture it's it's okay to say well i'm not in science you know, even though people are dependent on science and need to be making decisions informed decisions about things, have a scientific basis. so, so gene into win an award for science accessible to people. yeah but does that really translate into you know you think that that's your big contribution you have made too. well thank you mean some of these again, the incredible stories available to people. i think that's a big i you're unique and i can't think of someone else who's done as well. i think women there are people

coming on after you who have been inspired by your being a fan now or been inspired by things that you've written to go on and. do some wonderful books like why don't fish exist and things like that. so anyway, i think that's okay. we are going to questions in a minute here and i think there's just the one microphone. so i'm going to ask one last question myself and then you guys think of things you might want to ask while you have this unique opportunity with darva. and we'll get to your questions a minute at the microphone. so i want to ask i'm going to use my moderator privilege to ask you a question that i'm sure i'm the only one to ask you. you've mentioned to me that you thought at one point that the glass universe would be your last book. do you that after every book or do you think another book coming? no i didn't say after every i started after that. and i'm glad i was wrong.

i hope i have another book to write. i don't have an idea and i'm definitely getting on in years. so my memory is terrible now i have to read everything three times to register it and i can still forget it. the next day. so but i. i, i'm. there are more stories to tell. i'm and i, i'm trying to look at aging in most positive way. so, and for sociology of people of a similar age in the audience. so let me share this. so i'm 77 and 77 is the atomic number of iridium and of all the metals, iridium is the least to. now i'm going to, but it's the least except corrosion. so isn't that a nice to think

about? and at 80 we have platinum. yeah so there you go. do you have a question? yeah. thank you so much for being. my name is nathan and i'm a recent college graduate from washington, d.c. area. i'm hoping to teach history. one reason, one of the reasons why i'm particularly interested in your new book about, madame curie, is that that is that is that around the late 1930s, early 1940s, my late grandmother became physicist at a time when that was not at all a common profession for women and for women. and she got a of people discouraged her, but she pursued dreams. and i would say that inspiration has resonated into this generation. and i would say the inspiration for my grandmother's actions has resonated this generation. she also worked at the national

bureau of standards and question is as an aspiring as an aspiring educator myself i was wondering about your thoughts about this what you think is particular important for young people and for people today and future to take away and learn madame curie and what she accomplished and what she overcame. i think she faced the great crisis, her time she she was no stranger to political strife, warfare, disease and she she was just game. yeah. to to just not not spend any time moaning over why this has happened but just figure out what i can do in the situation and then try to do it.

thank you. thank you. thanks so much. you talked about one of your reviewers who talked about all the women who didn't quite make it, but she did. well, what do you think? distinguished her? why was she able to overcome the barriers that so few women could overcome? well, i was not entirely able to do that. i what that reviewer focused on was peers, death, which was certainly a big part of her achieving as much as she did because she had that to step into and science was at a point it was a new field very few people were doing the work in that field and she was there. so part of it was you could call it an accident of history part of it was the support network she had so that she able to keep

working even though she was a widow with children that was that in itself was unusual and probably her drive was abnormal. but not her interest in science? i think i think that's something that we should recognize. women have always been interested science for the same reasons are because it's intrinsically interesting and and there is no difference between the kinds of science women and the kinds of science men do. although women science often described as repetitive and boring, whereas men just have aha moments. that's really not the case. science. science has a lot repetition, no matter who's doing it.

i think the big difference between men and women in science is that the women have a harder time in and getting promoted promoted. i, i, i thought of this as you were talking about. well women's differing concepts of science and so forth. i was before you spoke here, just a half an hour before i was reading a i guess it was a book review in the new yorker on this book on emily's shuttle danielle, i think is the name of the author. and i think he was here. i think i may have come to see this. i don't know if you've read this book or i gone with it. and anyway one of the scientific debates that comes up in this book, which is focuses on emily at the time of of well, the 18th

century, and she was a lover of voltaire and actually sort of sort of, i think came, up with this debate themselves, the debate whether science progresses more through the aha moments of geniuses or whether it progresses more as emily thought more a social process as in which the work of one scientist builds on the work of many other scientists and so forth. so it's kind of this network. so it's actually call it debate between the social theory of science progress and the genius theory of you have comments on that and how? emily yeah, i mean, how marie would fit into this at all or you know, i think deaf at least science builds on, on work.

the lone genius idea and i'm guilty of using that myself but it's it's rare. it's, it's usually emily was right is right most of the time. but a lot of those people doing the social work of science have brilliant ideas that so it's it's a combination things. oh hi when my daughter born my mother gave her name eileen which is moonlight in language and we moonlight yeah say it again the name eileen i and we give a second name to her marie because of marie. marie curie. and now my question is how to raise marie i, i did marie do

have some advice because you said that was like unstoppable and see that she's little bit unstoppable now and maybe you need like just to raise your is a regular like traditionally what is your advice is it sounds like you've already done a great job. yeah yeah just you've you've been encouraging and expected a lot from her by giving her those names and it sounds though she's lived up to them. how old is she. three years. oh, three. okay. we just keep that going. yeah yeah. it's like, hello, my name is david. you spoke earlier about the unfortunately prevalent problem of people sort of saying, i'm interested in science. if we gave you the chance to

start solve that problem. where would you. well, i'd like to think i'm starting by my writing books, by talking about science in stories that, feel accessible to. you know, with longitude. i really the whole time i was writing, it was the family, you know, because friends would say, what are you working on? i'd say, oh, i'm writing a book about. how the problem of finding position at sea was solved and people just look down, you know, was it was just it was just ridiculous and i remember my my son, who was about ten at the time he would say to, me, do you really think anybody's going to read this? and i didn't. i used to. and then the impossible this book became a bestseller and and some sometimes people talk to me

about why they had picked it up why they had it and a couple of women said, you know, i didn't think be interested in a book about science, but it opened it up and it started off once upon a time and then it was a story and i could follow it. so that was very and i think i mean, that's that's the answer to linda's question too. that's that's what i think works that there has to be a story to tell there has to be a compelling figure in the story and then some people tell me skip over the science and they just follow the story. but if they get interested interested, that's a victory. and then if they're interested are lots of other things they can read.

well. and i think one of the things that you've done so well is to show that science is a human endeavor just like anything else. it's not inaccessible. yeah, people have. and people who say they're not interested in science have an image of scientists as robots. you as as somehow a people who aren't they don't have human emotions. you know they just they just science which is a kind of ai and you see that emphasized in places so often the scientist in a film or a book is somebody who doesn't have normal emotions or can't relate you know it's it's a it's a well-established characterization and it's it's inaccurate and. it does a disservice to a whole lot of