The element was hard to get and extremely expensive but essential for Curie’s cancer research
Curie, who lived in France for much of her life, had done an interview with an American reporter named Marie Meloney the year before. In that interview, she told Meloney that she didn’t have any radium to continue her research and that she couldn’t afford any, writes Ann Lewicki in the journal Radiology. After a fundraising campaign led by American women, Curie travelled to the United States to be presented with one gram of radium by President Warren Harding on May 20, 1921.
She needed the radium for her ongoing research. But the element was expensive, and Curie was living off a single professor’s salary while supporting her two teenage daughters. Her husband and collaborator Pierre, with whom she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, had died in 1906.
“She who had discovered radium, who had freely shared all information about the extraction process, and who had given radium away so that cancer patients could be treated, found herself without the financial means to acquire the expensive substance,” Lewicki writes.
Meloney, then the editor of a women’s magazine called The Delineator, started the Marie Curie Radium Fund soon after her return to the United States. “The price of 1 gram of radium in 1921 was $100,000,” Lewicki writes. That’s about $1.3 million today. Although the sum was astronomical, Lewicki writes, the Radium Fund was able to raise it in less than a year. Numerous prominent women academics rallied around the cause.
In fact, writes Suzanne Gould for the American Association of University Women, “the Marie Curie Radium Fund was so successful that it raised an additional $56,413.54.” Curie never touched that money, which was eventually put in a trust for her daughter, who was continuing her research. The funds eventually became a fellowship for French or American women in science.[…]
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