Looking at Myself Dead

Marie Curie, my daughter, and the ripple effects of genius

Greetings, Wonderful Humans!

Today’s illustrated essay was originally going to be the first episode of my podcast. But while I was producing it, I realized this wasn’t quite what I wanted for the podcast. The podcast is still on track to debut next month with a new episode that I’ll be teasing soon!

Looking at Myself Dead

Mortars and mustard gas rain down all along the western front between Germany and France. Bits of shrapnel rip limbs free from bodies. Men are dying miserable deaths and battlefield doctors are stuck guessing where to operate, often guessing wrong and killing or further maiming their patients.

It’s 1915, and the war that did not, in fact, end all wars is in full swing.

Just behind the front lines, close enough to still be in danger of dying from a poorly targeted artillery strike, a wealthy widow and her teenage daughter are working a miracle of battlefield medicine. The widow is one of France’s most famous citizens.

Two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie and her daughter Irene operate a mobile X-ray laboratory, which the French lovingly call a petite Curie. It’s part of a fleet of such vehicles that Curie is responsible for funding and organizing.

You may have learned in school that the X-ray was invented by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. That’s true.

But what you probably didn’t learn was that his discovery was enhanced by Marie Curie’s experiments with radium, and that Curie revolutionized medicine, first on the battlefield and later in hospitals.

What you definitely didn’t learn in school is that Marie Curie saved my daughter’s life.

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Let’s leave the Western Front of 1915 for now and move forward to a pediatrician’s office in Salem, Oregon, circa 2011. My second daughter, we’ll call her Char, short for Charlotte, is three years old and has been unusually lethargic. Her pediatrician listens to her chest and suggests she get an X-ray.

Dr. Marlow is also a family friend. He does not recommend shooting cosmic rays into a child’s chest lightly. That’s when I start to think Char has more than just a stubborn cold.

Char, her mother, and I head down to imaging. We wait. Char sits between us, laying her head on her mother’s lap.

When Char’s name is called, we learn that only one parent can go back. I pick up Char and carry her back.

Have you ever seen how they X-ray a toddler? It’s not for the faint of heart.

Char, despite being very good at being still, is placed on a chair and a transparent tube, something that looks like it’s out of a dystopian sci-fi movie, is closed around her body, with her arms outstretched above her head.

My usually vivacious Char doesn’t even cry. She slightly whimpers once at the discomfort.

I watch around a lead-lined corner as the technician does her job with precision and compassion.

It’s all over in a few minutes.

An hour later, Mike, Dr. Marlow, gives us a call. Char has pneumonia and needs to go on antibiotics right away. If her lungs don’t start to clear in the next few days, Char will need to go up to Portland to the children’s hospital.

Thanks to modern medicine, including antibiotics and the X-ray machine, Char’s malady was diagnosed, and she recovered swiftly, returning to laughing and teasing her siblings with an impish grin.

I’m recording this in May of 2026, and X-rays are boring, commonplace even, something far from miraculous. They aren’t anywhere near the most advanced imaging technology we have. Nuclear medicine makes the early and easy diagnosis of everything from cancer to infections feel routine.

But if Char had been born 150 years earlier, she likely would’ve died from her pneumonia. Children used to die, and tragically, in many parts of the world, still do, from easily treated diseases and illnesses all the time. The combination of antibiotics and imaging technology has transformed medicine.

Even if Char had been born after the X-ray machine was invented in 1895, she would never have had the benefit of it because taking X-rays was expensive and required a large apparatus.

But Marie Curie pioneered mobile X-ray technology, shrinking the machines and the lab space needed to develop the X-ray films during the First World War.

That technology saved my daughter’s life. But for our family, and everyone working at the clinic that day, it was all a matter of routine. Just another Wednesday.

Just another Wednesday for Marie Curie between 1897 and 1902 included cooking dinner for her husband Pierre and their young daughter Irene, and progressing through seven tons of black rock purchased from a Bavarian mine called pitchblende, boiling the rocks in a thick iron cauldron with different solutions and acids to try and extract an element new to science: radium.

In 1885, Wilhelm Röntgen would take the world’s first image of a human hand, the hand of his wife, Bertha, using a mysterious thing called X-rays. When first seeing the image, he blurted out, “I have seen my death!” It was Bertha who immediately saw the medical utility of the discovery.

Today, we often use the phrase X-ray to refer to the image produced by shooting X-rays at an object (or body part) placed against a photographic plate, and we use the same word for the beam of electromagnetic energy that creates the image. X-rays are used to create X-rays.

A radiologist is a doctor who specializes in interpreting images such as X-rays. Radiologist comes from radioactive, a term coined by Marie Curie to describe the atomic characteristic of some elements where the atoms emit different kinds of electromagnetic energy.

The Curies knew of Röntgen’s work, which overlapped their early investigations into radioactivity. Röntgen would discover X-rays, and the Curies, mostly Marie, would discover how radioactivity worked and explain its elemental nature, meaning some elements were radioactive because of their atomic structure, not due to any chemical reaction.

Marie & Pierre Curie would share the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with Antoine Henri Becquerel. Pierre insisted that Marie be included in the prize even though the mucky-mucks at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wanted to exclude her for being a woman.

Pierre was killed in a carriage accident in 1906.

Marie would be awarded a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this one in chemistry, making her the only person to ever win two Nobel Prizes in two categories.

By the time Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated while touring Sarajevo, ushering in war all across Europe in 1914, Marie Curie had taken over her late husband’s position at the prestigious Sorbonne, and had become a fixture in Paris society as well as the international scientific community.

Marie Curie had already done enough remarkable things for anyone by early 20th-century standards, especially for a woman who had immigrated from Russian-occupied Poland to France when still in her early twenties.

But Curie wasn’t done creating material for future biographers yet.

As German forces seemed poised to seize Paris, Curie took her rare sample of radium, placed it in a lead-lined box, and left Paris for Bordeaux to keep the precious element out of enemy hands.

Curie placed the radium sample in a safety deposit box at a Bordeaux bank and then returned to a Paris in chaos.

When Curie returned home, she began her career as an ambulance influencer. She paused all her research and began pestering and cajoling friends to donate money and vehicles to her pet project. French soldiers were dying at alarming rates all along the front because of inadequate access to modern medical care.

Battlefield doctors couldn’t run X-rays. Those were only available in the big cities. This meant many soldiers died because surgeons couldn’t find all the shrapnel in their bodies.

Using her wealth and the donations from her friends and contacts in elite Paris society, Curie assembled a fleet of vehicles that she took to a team of auto mechanics to convert into mobile x-ray laboratories of Curie’s own design.

Many influential and wealthy Parisians were fleeing to the countryside and preparing to preserve their assets. Curie and her teenage daughter Irene went to war.

Creating a fleet of mobile X-ray labs, vehicles that soldiers would lovingly dub petites Curie, might have been enough heroics for most wealthy and influential 47-year-old women in 1915 Paris.

But it was not enough for Marie Curie. Instead, Marie took her 17-year-old daughter Irene and headed with her fleet of petites Curie to the front lines, where they operated a mobile X-ray lab and trained others on how to use this new technology to help doctors save lives.

After the war, Curie refused to slow down. Instead, she founded two cutting-edge medical research institutions. One in Paris and one in her native Poland.

In the years since Char’s chest X-ray, I’ve lost count of the X-rays the members of my family have needed. Getting an X-ray is not a big deal in the 21^st century.

Of course, medical imaging technology has advanced so much that X-rays seem kind of crude these days. Every bit of medical imaging technology we take for granted, things like MRIs and CT scans, owe their existence to the work of Marie Curie.

It was a CT scan that revealed a malignant tumor on one of my kidneys seven years ago. And it was a series of CT scans over two years that showed that my surgeon had successfully removed all of the tumor (along with 1/3 of my right kidney, a sacrifice I’m happy to have made), and that I was cancer-free.

I count my daughter and myself among the millions of people whose lives Marie Curie has saved through her research and work on radiation and the medical applications of this terrible power.

Curie was already famous when she went to war. But in the decades after the war, she became a bona fide global celebrity. Curie was never keen on being famous, but she tolerated it to advance her research.

During a fundraising trip to the United States for her medical institutes, where she dined at the White House, Curie wrote a friend, “When they talk about my ‘splendid work’ it seems to me that I’m already dead—that I’m looking at myself dead.”

I was not nearly as poetic as the scientists Curie or Röntgen when hearing about my daughter’s X-ray. I mostly felt hope that we knew the problem and how to solve it.

Years later, when looking at the film of my tumor, even as my nephrologist told me that it was very early-stage cancer and would likely be easily removed with surgery, I felt, but could not articulate, “I have seen my death! I’m looking at myself dead.”

Life is a weird bit of poetry like that. The research that would save millions of lives, including my daughter’s and mine, and likely many people you know, also makes us apprehend our own inevitable death with stark clarity.

I consulted the following sources for this essay:

Public domain images of Marie Curie, Wilhelm Röntgen, and Bertha Röntgen courtesy of Wikipedia.

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout, Lauren Redniss (2010)

Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, Barbara Goldsmith (2005)

The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, Dava Sobel (2024)

Marie Curie: A Life, Susan Quinn (1995)

Thanks for reading! Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,