100 years after Marie Curie was awarded the 2nd Nobel Prize and on the occasion of her birthday on November 7, a brief interview with Carlos Fiolhais about this unique woman.
António Piedade – How did the press at the time deal with the news of the award of the Nobel Prize, which was the second, something unprecedented today with regard to different scientific disciplines.
Carlos Fiolhais – At the time, more important than the Nobel Prize (the second for Madame Curie, an unprecedented fact for two different scientific disciplines) was the scandal of the scientist's love affair with her fellow physicist Prof. Paul Langevin. Marie Curie had been a widow for a few years, but he was married and had children. The press even said that she was a foreigner who destroyed French homes… Curie resisted the pressure and received the Nobel. He said the obvious: that no one had anything to do with his private life. The romance eventually ended. Curious fact: grandchildren of both came, many years later, to get married!
AP – Is it possible to attribute a causal relationship between the Nobel Prizes awarded to Marie Curie and the progressively greater participation of women in scientific activity worldwide?
CF – Madame Curie is a unique and pioneering case. Women's participation in scientific life XNUMX years ago was very limited. The entry of a woman as a university professor in Portugal was only at that time: the philologist Carolina Michaelis, born in Germany but married to a Portuguese, started teaching at the University of Coimbra. Madame Curie was always considered a role model, but women's entry into University and science was very slow. People like Einstein, while admiring Madame Curie, continued to feel that women lacked the creativity to do science. They were deeply mistaken!
AP – Was Marie Curie's scientific activity known in Portugal at the time of the awards?
CF – Yes, Madame Curie's name has traveled the world. In Portugal, news about science was very rare, but Nobel prizes began to receive media coverage from an early age. Only a few years later Madame Curie had Portuguese disciples, such as Mário Silva, a professor in Coimbra, and Manuel Valadares, a professor in Lisbon. The two were later fired by the Estado Novo. There was also a Portuguese disciple of Curie, Branca Marques, from Lisbon.
AP – What has been the evolution of female participation in Portuguese science since the time of Marie Curie?
CF – Female participation in science was very low at a time when science, in fact, almost did not exist. In the last 30 years, however, there has been an enormous growth of science in Portugal, with an increasing female participation. Today, Portugal can be proud of being one of the countries in Europe and even in the world with the highest percentage of women in scientific activity. This is explained by the growing access to higher education for women in Portugal after the 25th of April. In many courses, both at entrances and exits, they outnumber men.
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