LETTER : Nuclear fears made real

GEOFFREY LEAN refers to Marie Curie having worked with her husband Pierre in the discovery of radium. This is incorrect. For many years, their daughter Eve Joliot-Curie has campaigned to correct this misapprehension and affirmed that her mother alone was responsible for this success since at that time her father was engaged in an entirely different field of study. It is, of course, correct that they shared the Nobel Prize jointly, but this was only because the French Academy of Science would not permit a woman to present her own report and insisted it be sponsored by her husband in their joint names. More recently, Rosalind Franklin was less fortunate, since her early death from cancer precluded her from accepting the Nobel Prize for her role in the discovery of DNA.

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