The adage goes “like mother like daughter,” and in the case of Irene Joliot-Curie, truer words were never spoken. She was the daughter of two Nobel Prize laureates, Marie Curie[1] and Pierre Curie[2], and was herself awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935 together with her husband, Frederic Joliot.
While her parents received the...
In my work as a veterinary pharmacologist[1], I never know exactly what I’m going to get when I open my email. It could be a request from a veterinarian asking my team to determine the concentration of a drug to treat the shell of a turtle infected with fungal disease. Or it could be an inquiry from a researcher wondering whether we...
Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs[1], a class of fire-resistant industrial chemicals, were widely used in electrical transformers, oils, paints[2] and even building materials[3] throughout the 20th century. However, once scientists learned PCBs were accumulating in the environment and posed a cancer risk to humans, new PCB production was banned in...
You’re in a meeting when your boss suggests changing a number to make the quarterly report look stronger. Heads nod. The slides move on. You feel a knot in your stomach: Do you speak up and risk being branded difficult, or stay silent and become complicit?
Most people picture defiance as dramatic outbursts. In reality, it’s often these...