Astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, Marie Curie Play. Nov 22, 2019, Part 2

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🗓️ 22 November 2019

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

For most Americans, the story of the Hubble Space Telescope began on April 24th, 1990, the launch date of the now 30 year-old observatory. But for astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, Hubble’s journey began on a wintery day in early 1985 at a meeting at NASA headquarters, where she was assigned to the mission that would take Hubble into space. For the next five years, Sullivan, a former oceanographer and first female spacewalker, got to know Hubble intimately, training and preparing for its deployment. If Hubble’s automatic processes failed as it was detaching and unfolding from the spacecraft, Sullivan would be the one to step in and help. And she almost had to. Sullivan joins Ira to share the untold stories of Hubble’s launch and her time at NASA as told in her new book Handprints on Hubble. Physicist Marie Curie is remembered as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first person—of two ever in history—to win two Nobel Prizes. With her role in discovering radium and polonium, and the energy emitted in the decay of large atomic nuclei, she brought us the concepts of radiation and radioactivity. Curie helped lay the groundwork for a revolution in both physics and chemistry. But a new play explores the person behind the brilliant scientist. In The Half-Life Of Marie Curie, we meet Curie after a scandal: She’s been caught having a love affair with a married man. But in a time of depression and isolation, she’s rescued by a friend, English scientist Hertha Ayrton—also an intrepid but lesser-known physicist, engineer, and suffragette. Playwright Lauren Gunderson joins Ira to talk about the deep friendship between the two scientists, the importance of seeing Marie Curie as a person outside her work, and the many connections between storytelling and science.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.
0:02.8	A bit later in the hour, former astronaut Catherine Sullivan recalls what it took to launch the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit nearly, oh, 30 years ago.
0:12.6	If you have a question about the early days of Hubble or NASA's first class of female astronauts, you can give us a call.
0:18.5	Our number 844-724-8255, 844-724-8255, or you can tweet us at Cy-Fry.
0:28.5	But first we turn to Madam Marie Curie, the physicist who helped discover radium and with it radioactivity.
0:36.5	And for her work, she was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win two in different sciences. It's possible you knew that last part, but did you know that she also invented a portable X-ray to help injured French soldiers during World War I, or that she drove the ambulance and administered
0:56.1	the x-rays herself. Or how about this? She had a close friendship with another brilliant woman
1:01.4	in science, the English physicist and suffragette Hertha Ayrton. These are all just a few of the
1:07.4	things that I learned from a new play, the half-life of Marie Curie, which
1:11.5	pulls back a curtain to reveal the human side of the scientists. And now the playwright is with
1:17.2	me. Lauren Gunderson is a playwright whose webpage loudly, loudly proclaims, I love science.
1:22.4	Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira, I'm such a fan of the show. Thanks for having me.
1:27.1	Well, thank you. You know, I'm going to quote from your webpage again, I find deep and thrilling drama in the course of scientific progress and put it on stage as much as possible.
1:36.5	And you have been doing that during your career.
1:39.1	I have indeed. It's almost two decades of diving into science because I think science is incredibly stageworthy.
1:46.3	It's riveting. It's emotional. It's intellectually thrilling. So I always go back to it.
1:53.5	Let's talk about this latest play, The Half-Life of Marie Curie. It doesn't actually start with Madam Curie's science, but a personal scandal, right?
2:02.8	Indeed, yeah. What made me want to write this story was taking something that we do know, Marie Curie, and something we don't know, which one of those is a person, Hertha Ayrton, her great friend, and as you mentioned, incredible engineer and physicist and suffragist.
2:19.4	But also this moment in Marie Curie's life where, frankly, she was closer to Monica Lewinsky than to Albert Einstein.
2:26.5	She was brutalized in the press, absolutely just diminished and the just radical cruelty that she survived because of this
2:39.4	love scandal that her secret letters between her and her colleague, Paul Langevon,
2:46.4	were released to the press and it was just a Mayday against her. And here is this incredible woman.
	...

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