A health librarian at the cinema - Radioactive

Not at the cinema, really, but a DVD, but it was a feature film.

The film is about the life and work of Marie Curie, and her work with Pierre Curie.

Marie and Pierre, and Henri Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903.   The film has Pierre reporting that the Nobel Committee did not name Marie on the award.  And that Pierre told them that if they did not name her, he would not accept the award.  I don't know if those things were so.   The film does have a scene where Pierre comes back from Stockholm, having accepted the award, and it is clear that Marie has not attended.  Rockwell (1) suggests that actually, they both went to Stockholm, but not till 1905, as neither were in good health, and they were not able to travel to accept their award (p.175).

It tries to show the implications of their discoveries by leaping forward in time to a use of radiation as therapy in 1950s America (I am not sure why then and there specifically), to a test of an atomic bomb, to Hiroshima and to Chernobyl.   While important to see how their discoveries were used, I was not sure about these leaps, as I thought they implied that the Curies were aware of these implications of their work.   

Did the Curies see the possible therapeutic effects of radiation?  Certainly Pierre and Henri Becquerel studied the effect of radioactive substances on the body, Pierre putting radioactive substance on his skin and observing what happened (2).  I found another by three authors including Pierre in which they applied radioactive substances to mice and guinea pigs, but nothing more (3).  Rockwell (1) does indicate that the Institut du Radium, built in 1912, housed Marie Curie's research group and a separate group of doctors, led by Claudius Regaud, which was "pioneering the use of radiation in medical diagnosis and in the therapy of cancer" (p. 177).  Regaud was using radiotherapy to treat epitheliomas in 1911 (4)(p.317).  Tableau 1 (p.319) lists the first results of Regaud's team at the Institut Curie.  Mould (5) suggests Becquerel and Curie's work (2) led to therapeutic uses of radium, with an illustration from a case note from 1922. 

References

(1) Rockwell S. The life and legacy of Marie Curie. Yale J Biol Med. 2003;76(4-6):167-80. PMID: 15482656; PMCID: PMC2582731.

(2) Becquerel H, Curie P. Action physiologique des rayons du radium. Compt. Rend. Acad. Sci. 1901 Jun;132:1289-91.

(3) Bouchard C, Curie P, Balthazard V. Action physiologique de l’émanation de radium. CR Acad Sci Gen. 1904;138:1384-7.

(4) Foray N. Claudius Regaud (1870-1940): relecture des archives d'un pionnier de la radiobiologie et  de la radiotherapie.  Cancer Radiother. 2012;16:315-21.

(5) Mould RF. The discovery of radium in 1898 by Maria Sklodowska-Curie (1867-1934) and Pierre Curie (1859-1906) with commentary on their life and times. Br J Radiol. 1998;71:1229-54.

(1) is in PubMed Central, (3) and (4) are available freely through the Bibliotheque Nationale de France's Gallica service, which has digitised lots of material including earlier volumes of the Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des seances de l'Academie Nationale de Sciences.