“We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.”
— Marie Curie, Nobel Lecture in Chemistry (1911)
Marie Curie spoke these words in 1911 while accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, her second Nobel honor after winning in Physics eight years earlier. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a testament to her extraordinary contributions to our understanding of radioactivity.
When Curie and her husband Pierre first isolated radium in 1898, they were driven purely by scientific curiosity. The element was a mystery, a puzzle to be solved through painstaking research. They could not have predicted that their discovery would become a cornerstone of cancer treatment, saving countless lives through radiation therapy. This is precisely her point: the most profound scientific breakthroughs often emerge from research conducted without a specific application in mind.
Curie delivered this message at a time when the practical applications of radium were just beginning to be understood. She was defending the principle that science pursued for its own sake, for the expansion of human knowledge, deserves support and respect. The pressure to justify research through immediate usefulness existed even then.
Her words carry particular weight because she lived them. She worked in difficult conditions, faced discrimination as a woman in science, and persisted in her research despite having no guarantee of practical outcomes. The usefulness came later, as it so often does.
