It was Catherine Chamié who Curie placed in charge.’ In later years, Curie had less and less to do with the day-to-day running of the laboratories. The women were supportive of each other and often collaborated together. ‘However, by most accounts Curie was distant. ‘The women researchers worshipped Curie,’ the Rayner-Canhams say. Even so, the culture of the Radium Institute was unique. The women at the Radium Institute were supportive of each other and often collaborated togetherīy this time there were an increasing number of women in science, although much of their contribution remains unacknowledged and often went unrecorded at the time, according to Geoffrey and Marelene Rayner-Canham, authors on a chapter on Perey in the book Women in their Element. And yet, despite her misgivings, a few days later a letter arrived telling her she had been hired. The interview was a disaster, and Perey felt relief she would never have to set foot in the gloomy institute again. At first Perey assumed it was a secretary, but to her surprise she realised it was none other than the most famous woman in France: two-time Nobel prize winner Marie Skłodowska Curie. Her interviewer was dressed entirely in black, hair tied up in a bun, her pale face behind thick glasses. Soon after, she interviewed for a job as a personal assistant at the Radium Institute, a dark building near the Jardin du Luxembourg she found ‘melancholy and sombre’. Instead, in 1929 Perey took a diploma in chemistry at the Technical School of Women’s Education in Paris, which qualified her to work as a laboratory technician. She had dreamed of becoming a doctor, but when her father died the family was impoverished, their only income from her mother giving piano lessons. Perey was born just outside Paris, France in 1909. Inadvertently, she had recreated one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 20th century: Marguerite Perey’s discovery of the last non-synthetic element, francium. Walking across her lab at the University of California, Berkeley, US, Shield checked the team’s giant tome of known spectra and realised she’d been beaten to her find by 80 years. I was completely confused, and so I started thinking about actinium’s decay chains.’ ![]() ‘It looked like I had thorium, but the major peak wasn’t there. ‘I was looking at spectra of one of my column separations and was like “What is this peak? This peak shouldn’t be here!”’ The strange peaks were almost – but not quite – in line with thorium, the element into which actinium decays around 98% of the time. ![]() While experimenting with actinium-227, she had come across unusual results while performing gamma spectroscopy. In September 2019, Katherine Shield thought she’d made the breakthrough of her career – a new, never-seen phenomenon.
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