Communication pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
ConfChem Conference on A Virtual Colloquium to Sustain and Celebrate IYC 2011 Initiatives in Global Chemical EducationMSC100: The French-Polish Accent of the IYC2011 Robert Guillaumont,† Janusz Lipkowski,‡ Barbara Petelenz,*,§ and Jean-Pierre Vairon∥ †
National Committee for Chemistry, French Academy of Sciences, 23 Quai de Conti, Paris 75006 France Institute of Physical Chemistry and Committee for Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kasprzaka 44/52, Warsaw 01-224, Poland § Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Radzikowskiego 152, Cracow 31-342, Poland ∥ Laboratoire de Chimie Macromoleculaire and National Committee for Chemistry, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie - CNRS, Case 185, Tour 44 4 Place Jussieu, Paris Cedex 05 75252, France ‡
S Supporting Information *
ABSTRACT: The events organized for IYC 2011 were held in tandem with MSC100, that is, the joint French-Polish celebrations marking the centenary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Marie Skłodowska-Curie. These celebrations emphasized the traditional cultural bonds that exist between the two countries, the unique contribution of Marie and Pierre Curie to the development of science, and the beneficial role of Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s discoveries. This communication summarizes one of the invited papers to the ConfChem online conference A Virtual Colloquium to Sustain and Celebrate IYC 2011 Initiatives in Global Chemical Education, held from May 18 to June 28, 2012, and jointly hosted by the ACS DivCHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education and the IUPAC Committee on Chemistry Education.
KEYWORDS: Continuing Education, General Public, Public Understanding/Outreach, Nuclear/Radiochemistry, Women In Chemistry
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oland and France decided to mark the centenary of awarding of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Marie Skłodowska-Curie in a combined MSC100 (Marie SkłodowskaCurie 100 years) event that was a major highlight of the International Year of Chemistry (IYC) 2011. The aim of MSC100 was to remember the scientific and social impact of Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s achievements and to stress the traditional cultural bonds between the country of her birth and the country she later embraced. The MSC100 initiatives offered an overview of the remarkable life and work of this woman: her youth spent in partitioned Poland, her university studies at the Sorbonne, her marriage and her research work with Pierre Curie, her part in the war effort in France, and, in particular, her and her husband’s contribution to the development of science and to its beneficial application.1−7 Covers of magazines highlighting the 100 year celebration of Marie SkłodowskaCurie are shown in Figure 1.
These ground-breaking discoveries introduced the world to “radioactive matter”, the study of which would in turn lead to the discovery of natural radioactive families, isotopes, the atomic nucleus, artificial radioactivity, nuclear fission of uranium, the production of transuranic elements and their major uses, the release of nuclear energy, radiotherapy, labeled radioactive molecules, and so forth. These advances have fundamentally reshaped modern life. It was the methodology used by Marie Skłodowska-Curie to make invisible matter visible that paved the way for the extraordinary advances we have seen in both science and everyday life. MSC100 sought to sum up and celebrate her great achievement. Madame Curie proved that polonium is selectively carried down by bismuth precipitates, whereas radium is carried down by barium chloride. Moreover, she indicated that further dissolution−precipitation cycles, when performed correctly, lead to progressively Po- or Ra-enriched precipitates. Here is the key to the success of the precipitation−dissolution− precipitation protocol based on “entrainment” (in fact, coprecipitation by syncrystallization) that enabled her (and others) to isolate highly active sources of Po and Ra. Today
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MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS AND OUTCOMES OF MARIE CURIE’S WORK HIGHLIGHTED DURING MSC100 Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie are universally recognized for their discovery of polonium and radium.12,13 © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
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precipitations. Using only 0.5 μg of 239Pu, G. T. Seaborg was able to demonstrate the fission of 239Pu. The “radioactivity era” essentially began in 1896−1898 with the discoveries of Po and Ra. The “nuclear era” opened between 1938 and 1940. Nowadays, “radioactive matter” is managed on a scale of thousands of tons, whereas total Ra compounds extracted around the world never exceeded 1 kg.
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INFORMATION ADDED DURING CONFCHEM Marie Skłodowska-Curie was influenced by the famous European scientists of her day only indirectly: her mentor in physics, Józef Jerzy Boguski, was once the assistant of Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev; her chemistry professor, Napoleon Milicer, studied under Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. The “Floating University”, an outlawed institution organized by Polish positivists for women, offered clandestine courses on social and natural sciences. Marie Curie’s doctoral research was inspired by the discovery of “Becquerel rays”,14 but contrary to some Wikipedia versions,15 Henri Becquerel was not her supervisor. The influence that Pierre and Marie had on each other and the difference between the two Nobel Prizes she was awarded were among the issues discussed during the MSC100 opening ceremony at the Sorbonne.16 Marie Curie has featured in Polish school textbooks since at least the 1930s.17 Marie Curie’s notebooks were decontaminated in 1967. The dose rates are extremely low. This paper was discussed from June 8 to June 14 during the spring 2012 ConfChem online conference: A Virtual Colloquium to Sustain and Celebrate IYC 2011 Initiatives in Global Chemical Education. This conference was jointly hosted by the ACS DivCHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE) and the IUPAC Committee on Chemistry Education. The conferences are open to the public and can be accessed at http://www.ccce.divched.org/spring2012confchem.
Figure 1. Magazine covers honoring the 100 year celebration of Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry: (top left) a special issue of the research news magazine,8 dedicated to the scientific legacy of Marie Skłodowska-Curie (in French), February 2011; (top right) a special issue of the IUPAC bulletin9 prepared by the French-Polish guest editors to commemorate Marie Skłodowska-Curie and her contributions to Chemistry and other disciplines (in English), January 2011; (bottom left) the MSC100 dossier in the special issue of the monthly edited by the French Chemical Society10 (in French), May 2011; and (bottom right) a special Polish-French issue of the popular history monthly,11 dedicated to Poland and France during the times of Marie Skłodowska-Curie (in Polish), June 2011.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT
* Supporting Information S
Full paper from the ConfChem conference. This material is available via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org.
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Marie Curie’s methodology is included within the framework of the general laws governing the two-phase partitioning of an element, whatever and however low its concentration may be. These laws explain how a microcomponent (Po or Ra) can be separated from a macrocomponent (Bi or Ba), how it can be concentrated, and finally how it can be separated in a quasipure form. Radiochemists used the co-precipitation protocol to isolate, or at least characterize, all natural radioelements. Frederic and Irène Joliot-Curie provided the chemical proof of artificial radioactivity through the “entrainment” of 250,000 atoms of 30P (β+ emitter) in the form of phosphine or phosphate from a solution whose very low initial concentration (10−16 M) decreased in a few minutes. In turn, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann gave the proof of the nuclear fission of uranium by carrying down a few million 140Ba atoms with Ba as a macrocomponent, without any possibility of the precipitates being enriched. Using various stable compounds as carriers, Edwin McMillan and Philip Abelson were able to carry down 30 million 239Np atoms, thus providing the very first chemical evidence of a new family of actinides. Glen Seaborg, Arthur Wahl, and Joseph Kennedy also isolated and identified a few tenths of a microgram of 238Pu and 239Pu through co-
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank Hélène Langevin-Joliot and Andrzej Kajetan Wróblewski for their first-hand accounts.
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REFERENCES
(1) Curie, M. Pierre Curie & Autobiographical Notes (translated by Kellogg, C.; Kellogg, V.); Macmillan: New York, 1932. (2) Curie, E. Madame Curie: A Biography (translated by Sheean, V.); Doubleday, Doran & Co.: New York, 1937. (3) Giroud, F. Une femme honorable. Marie Curieune vie, Fayard: Paris, 1982. (4) Quinn, S. Marie Curie: A Life, Simon & Schuster: New York, 1995. (5) Davies, N. The Heart of Europe: Short History of Poland. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1984.
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(6) Radium Institute in Paris: http://en.parisinfo.com/museummonuments/661/musee-curie-institut-du-radium (accessed Aug 2013). (7) Radium Institute in Warsaw. http://www.curie.org.pl/pl/frames_ pl.html (accessed Aug 2013). (8) La Recherche 2011, DLR no. 42. (9) Chemistry International 2011, 33 (1), 1−48. (10) L’Actualité Chimique 2011, no. 352, 1−61. (11) Mówią Wieki 2011, 6 (617), 1−102. (12) Adloff, J.-P.; Guillaumont; R. Fundamentals of Radiochemistry: CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL, 1993. (13) Guillaumont, R. Actualité Chimique 2011, 352, V−XI. (14) Curie, M. Recherches sur les substances radioactives; GauthierVillars: Paris, 1903. (15) The error appears in e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_ Curie (accessed Aug 2013), http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie (accessed Aug 2013), http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie (accessed Aug 2013), https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie (accessed Aug 2013). Among the correct versions are the following: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie (accessed Aug 2013), http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie (accessed Aug 2013), http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Sk%C5%82odowska-Curie (accessed Aug 2013), http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/СклодовскаяКюри,_Мария (accessed Aug 2013) (16) Daily Motion. http://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x1mdgr_ Palais_de_la_decouverte_conferences-colloques/1#video=xj4p9v (accessed Aug 2013) (17) Wróblewski, A. K. Private communication, June 2012.
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