History has long celebrated men as the faces of science, with Marie Curie standing as a rare and often singular exception. Science has too often silenced the very voices it should have celebrated – voices that history is only now beginning to cherish.
All the fame and respect Watson and Crick received in their lifetime was the effort of a woman who sacrificed her life for science. If her male co-worker had never shown the X-ray diffraction image of DNA ( photo- 51) she worked so hard on, it might have been Rosalind Franklin whom we would be learning about today as the discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA. She might have single-handedly won the Nobel Prize for the discovery that Watson and Crick are credited with. However, I highly doubt whether the Academy would have allowed Ms. Franklin to receive one, considering how it foul-played in denying Mileva Marić and initially overlooking Marie Curie.
The theory Einstein once tenderly called ‘our theory’ in personal letters to Mileva Marić was later claimed as solely ‘his theory’ in published papers and during Nobel Prize recognition — a quiet rewriting that history chose to overlook. It was solely due to the firm stance of Pierre Curie that Marie Curie received recognition for her hard work. If it hadn’t been for Pierre Curie, Marie might have been another Mileva Marić — waiting for some future historian to piece together the truth from personal diaries and forgotten letters.
The world has known its share of Pierre Curies, Gopalrao Joshis, and Jyotiba Phules — quiet allies who stood beside their brilliant other halves— but they have too often been outnumbered by the Einsteins and Darwins who let their brilliance eclipse the deserved to shine, often intentionally!
By,
Devu Vinodini,
III DC English
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