Podcast: Rosamund Pike in Radioactive, and the resurgence of Russian science

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Welcome back to the Nature Podcast. This week, Curie in the movies…

Host: Nick Howe

And the state of science in Russia. I’m Nick Howe.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

And I’m Benjamin Thompson.

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Host: Benjamin Thompson

So, it appears then that events have overtaken us. The ongoing coronavirus outbreak means that we’re all working from home for the foreseeable future. I’m actually recording my links in my basement in South London. There’s a definite paucity of natural light here and you might hear some trains going by and maybe my daughter testing the resilience of our kitchen cabinets by whamming into them with her baby walker, so apologies for that. But Nick, how about you? Where are you right now?

Host: Nick Howe

At the moment, I’m in a poorly constructed pillow fort to try and get some semblance of sound isolation and get rid of some of that echo because I’m in a very empty and echo-y house and again, there’s some train lines, but hopefully this is sounding pretty okay.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

So, clearly then, this isn’t an ideal situation, but we’re going to make the best of it and figure everything out as we go along, and thank you so much for your understanding everybody. If you’d like to have a look at our setups then we’ve put some photos and some videos up on our Twitter feed – @NaturePodcast.

Host: Nick Howe

So, with that in mind, let’s get on with the show. First up, we’re heading to the movies. This week was due to see the UK release of Radioactive, a new film taking a look at the life and work of double Nobel laureate Marie Skłodowska Curie. It looks like a lot of cinemas are now closing given everything that’s going on, but hopefully this will be a nice vicarious trip to the movies. Curie is portrayed in the film by British actor Rosamund Pike. Now, back in 2018 when Rosamund was preparing for the role, she sought scientific advice from Nature’s own Lizzie Gibney. The two of them met up earlier this month in a London hotel to talk about the film and what it’s like to play a scientific giant. Here’s Rosamund explaining what Radioactive is all about.

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

It’s a biography, to a degree, about Madame Curie, but it’s also a biography of radioactivity as a phenomenon. So, it’s not a conventional film as befits an unconventional woman, and we kind of chart the fallout of this discovery made by Marie and Pierre Curie and obviously, Henri Becquerel was involved as well. So, it’s a love story – a love story to science and a love story between Marie and Pierre.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And how much did you know about Marie before you took on the role?

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

It’s very hard to untangle what one knew then and what, obviously, one knows now, but I think I knew almost nothing. I think I had very vague notions. I don’t even think I knew that she’d won two Nobel Prizes. I certainly didn’t know that she then had a daughter who also won a Nobel Prize, nor did I know about her reinvention of herself during the First World War and what she did bringing X-ray machines and mobile X-ray units onto battlefields.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

It’s almost like she had two careers.

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

Yes, and she had this very extraordinary life kind of torn apart by grief half way through, and I think you see a woman who is notably, markedly changed by that loss, as she would be because I think Marie and Pierre Curie had a very modern, forward-thinking, unconventional for the time marriage. How often, even now, do you meet a man who says, ‘Yes, I want a wife who’s my equal, who we’re going to collaborate on an intellectual pursuit together, I want her to absolutely fall into step with me in love, in life, in work.’ It’s very rare, and they had a truly beautiful marriage, I think, and I always think about that moment, how it must have felt that night when they isolated radium for the first time and saw this pinprick of green glowing, and that moment when it’s just yours. I kind of find that whole idea intoxicating.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

Before the rest of the world knew about it.

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

Yes, before the rest of the world knew about it, and then all the ethical dilemmas that come with it arrive on your doorstep and that moment where it feels to me like the ultimate all-nighter, which I’m sure many scientists relate to, where you just can’t stop, you’re so on the brink and there it is revealed, and it’s that sort of blissful exhaustion of knowing that you’ve done it. It must be the best feeling in the world, I imagine.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And why is it then that taking on this role you wanted to learn more about physics and chemistry. Is it something that an actor usually does?

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

Well, I knew that I couldn’t play Marie Curie unless I could have some inkling of what might be going on in her brain outside of the lines of the script. Thinking is one of the hardest things to convey cinematically, so we have to create beauty out of it and interest. I have to know the practical application of how they might have done any of the different procedures they did in the journey towards isolating these elements, as well as on the spectrometer exactly what those readings showed and how, when you saw the little graph, that a certain piece of uranium ore had a higher quantity of this unknown element. I had to be able to look at these readings with knowledge and accuracy because the film camera is in your eyes. They’re close ups, they’re seeing the activity of your brain, and I had to be able to look like my brain was processing, and it’s more exciting if your brain is processing accurate information and it’s not just thinking about what you’re going to have for breakfast. It’s obviously more enticing and exciting.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And many of our listeners are scientists. Is there anything that you learnt about the process or the way that science works that surprised you?

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

Well, it didn’t really surprise me, but it might surprise a lot of viewers that success and discovery is a long, hard, arduous process involving many hours and tough toil, particularly under the conditions that Marie and Pierre were working under. Theirs was not this pristine, immaculate laboratory. They had a kind of shoddy lean-to at the side of one of the faculties of the Sorbonne, which had terrible conditions for the kind of experiments they were doing. It was overheated in the summer, it was airless, and then in the winter, this tremendous draught would blow through. I mean it was freezing and it was very hard to keep stable conditions for their experiments.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

And what sense did you get of Marie as a person?

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

I had to take my cue from a lot of still photographs. But one thing I noticed was that she rarely stops to pose for a photograph. She looks thoroughly impatient if she’s ever asked to stand still, so I thought, okay, this woman is busy, and I took that as my cue. If you see even the photograph of the Solvay Conference and all these men are standing in sort of perfect formation, and Marie Curie is in the centre, in the front row, and she’s in conversation with the gentleman on either her right or left, I can’t remember, but by that one detail she sort of renders these other fellows sort of incredibly pompous because suddenly they look like they’re just sort of embracing this moment in a very grandiose manner and Marie Curie is just too busy. She’s got too many interesting things in her mind and she’s not going to stop for anything as frivolous as a photograph. I took her as charmingly eccentric in the most lovely way. Direct. She had things to be done. She was unfiltered. She had something in her mind. Why waste time with flattery or trying to get what you wanted by anything other than the most direct means? So, I played her very direct, sometimes rude, but not through deliberately wanting to be rude, but just as a function of wanting to get things done.

Interviewer: Lizzie Gibney

She was obviously a phenomenal scientist and a pioneer as a woman in science. Sometimes there’s some concern about putting her up as a role model in that she was so extraordinary that maybe women going into science today, if they think that’s the only model by which women succeed in science, it almost is off-putting. What do you think about that?

Interviewee: Rosamund Pike

It’s a very interesting point. Is she too fearsomely brilliant to encourage women into the field? We talk about that in the film industry with female directors all the time, that you have to change the sort of brain DNA of little girls – not literal DNA, I’m talking metaphorically here – but you have to make little girls believe that they can be a director. You have to sort of start building the ego to such a point. I know that the swathe of children’s books about great female scientists has really inspired little girls of my son’s age, the sort of 8-year-old, primary school bracket. I mean I went into my son’s school and did a talk on Marie Curie and made all the school hall dark and used glow sticks to illustrate the discovery, the pop of when polonium, blue glow sticks, and green glow sticks for radium. The only fear is that the children will go away thinking that Marie Curie invented glow sticks, but the moment of the awe, the surprise, the delight, and I had certainly told the story of this discovery and what it took and how you can have an idea and you can make the invisible visible. What did she say? She said something brilliant like, ‘Nothing in life is to be feared. It’s only to be understood.’ And I think it’s a sort of very good motto to live by, really.

Host: Nick Howe

That was Rosamund Pike talking with Nature’s Lizzie Gibney. If you’d like to hear even more from Rosamund about how she played Marie Curie, we’ve got a longer version of this interview, which we’ll put up as a podcast extra later on this week.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Before we move on, we’ve got a tiny correction from last week’s show. You might remember the story we had about the bird fossilised in amber. Well, we misspoke a little. In the piece, we said that the bird skull was 7.1 millimetres long. Now, this figure only refers to the back section of the skull excluding the beak, and the skull is actually 14.25 millimetres long. So, with that cleared up, let’s get back to the show. It’s time for the Research Highlights, read this week by Dan Fox in his living room.

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Dan Fox

If it’s safe, stop what you were doing. If you were in the middle of a physical activity and stopped, you will have engaged an ultra-fast neural circuit between two parts of your brain. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco identified the circuit by analysing the brain activity of 21 people with Parkinson’s disease who are undergoing surgery to implant deep stimulation electrodes in their subthalamic nucleus, a brain area central to movement control. The participants carried out a simple, computer-based task that involved pressing buttons according to instructions on a screen, but immediately stopped moving their hands when a signal flashed up. The scientists discovered a rapid circuit between the surface of the brain and the subthalamic nucleus. This circuit appears to be involved in stopping actions, and they hope that by modulating this circuit they could help treat some movement and impulsivity disorders. Stop and read that paper in full at Neuron.

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Dan Fox

Cleaning a work of art can be an art form in itself. Conservators tread a thin line between washing away an artwork’s contaminants and scrubbing off its paint. To get around this issue, scientists at the University of Florence sought a solvent-free approach to cleaning artworks that would minimise the risk of damage. They came up with a soft, jelly-like solid filled with water called a hydrogel for the job. By freezing a mixture of long- and short-chain polymer molecules in water, the researchers were able to produce a milky gel with irregular pores across its surface, like those on a sponge. When the hydrogel is applied to a painting, dirt migrates into these pores, leaving the paint pigments intact. Dust off that paper over at PNAS.

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Host: Benjamin Thompson

In the last few years, Russia has been trying to redevelop its science sector in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. This week, there’s a News Feature in Nature on how they’re doing it. Reporter Tristan Varela takes up the story.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

Pursuing a career in science isn’t usually a sure-fire path to fame and glory, but during the Soviet period in Russia, scientists were kind of a big deal.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

Being a scientist in the Soviet Union, it was like being a rock star today.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

That’s Denis Kurlov, a physicist who was born in the USSR.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

In the Soviet Union, there was a huge and very, very strong scientific school, and to be a scientist was a great honour.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

Soviet scientists worked on the cutting edge of many fields, including nuclear physics and space exploration. But the work was somewhat restricted.

Interviewer: Fyodor Kondrashov

Travel, especially international travel, was severely restricted for all citizens of the Soviet Union, including scientists.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

That’s Fyodor Kondrashov, who’s family left Russia in the early 90s when his father, a geneticist, got a job in the United States.

Interviewer: Fyodor Kondrashov

We left, actually, because I think my father was very curious for the first time in his life to be able to work side by side with his colleagues. So, the floodgates of the country opened with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that was really the start of the brain drain for Russia.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

After the Soviet Union dissolved, the science budget dropped roughly tenfold over the next decade, and tens of thousands of scientists moved away. This brain drain continues to this day, exemplified by many young scientists like Denis.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

I’ve heard from everyone, ‘If you want to do science, you better look for a place abroad.’

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

Fyodor says that many of the issues faced by researchers in Russia today stem from a disconnect between governmental decisions and scientific practice.

Interviewer: Fyodor Kondrashov

The country still has a barrier to the purchase of consumables if you are, for example, a molecular biologist, right. Consumables are more expensive because you have to pay a tariff on it, so you can imagine, right, that running a lab somewhere in an average university in Russia, if you have to pay three times the cost of consumables compared to if you work in Tennessee, that’s a big barrier because obviously, your budget is clearly not going to be as big. There was recently abolished but still that made a big wave in the Russian science community that was an attempt to have any conversation with a foreign scientist to be mandated to be reported to the government, which is absolutely absurd. But I think it also creates a feeling of dread among the young science population, that they see all of these small restrictions and absurdities and recognise that this is not something they want to deal with.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

Many of the scientists who left Russia have made successful careers elsewhere. Fyodor is a professor of evolutionary genomics at IST Austria and told me he has no intention of returning to Russia. And Denis has only good things to say about when he did his PhD in the Netherlands.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

Honestly, the first few years, I used to think I would never go back to Russia.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

That was until Denis returned for a visit during his PhD.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

I spoke to people here and it became really clear to me that the situation is far different from what it was in the 90s or even ten years ago, and now I see basically what I saw in Europe. I saw that in an institute, something is always going on. So, when I walk for a coffee in the corridor, I encounter people having active, lively discussions on physics and there are foreign professors here who work here full time. They’re not Russians. They didn’t come back just because it’s the motherland. They came because they saw an emergent market, if you wish.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

Denis has since moved back to Russia to work at the Quantum Center in Moscow. He’s not alone in his return, and he believes that even scientists who left decades ago still care strongly about Russian science.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

The international collaboration is very strong, partly because all those scientists who left Russia in the 90s or later in the 2000s, many of them grew into famous and prominent physicists or other researchers. But I believe you are still connected to the place where you were educated and grown so, in a way, they want to be involved in this somehow and help to support science in Russia.

Interviewer: Tristan Varela

In 2018, the Russian government developed a strategy to increase spending on research, give more support to early career scientists, update existing scientific equipment, and create around 900 new labs. However, some say that progress is still too slow, and these planned measures may not be enough. Fyodor thinks that if Russia is serious about improving its scientific output, systemic changes need to be made.

Interviewer: Fyodor Kondrashov

I think the basic thing that Russia needs to do is to strengthen their social institutions and to increase the level of checks and balances and the very upper levels of the Russian government. You can keep patching up specific things to make sure that something survives to the future, but there will be no future unless social and governmental institutions make a fundamental change into a more balanced, democratic way of governance.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

Only time will tell whether Russia’s efforts to recover their scientific glory will bear fruit, but Denis, for one, remains optimistic.

Interviewee: Denis Kurlov

With enough funding, of course science in Russia will continue developing because the traditional science is still here, and there are hundreds of thousands of young students who have sparkle in their eyes and they want to do science. To the best of my abilities, I will try to support it.

Host: Nick Howe

That was Denis Kurlov from the Russian Quantum Center. You also heard from Fyodor Kondrashov from IST Austria. If you want to learn more about the state of science in Russia, then check out the show notes for a link to the News Feature.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

Normally at this point in the podcast, we would, of course, have the News Chat, but as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, pretty much everything is about COVID-19 at the moment, and we thought we’d keep this a coronavirus-free space for the time being. However, we will be launching a spinoff podcast all about COVID-19, so keep an eye out for that in your podcast feed, and Nick, you’ve actually made a short documentary looking at the outbreak.

Host: Nick Howe

That’s right, I’ve been chatting to researchers worldwide about what they’re doing in response to the outbreak, from epidemiologists to social scientists. Listeners, if you find yourselves with more time for podcasts, then you can find that episode in our normal feed or wherever you get your shows. That’s all for this week. I’m Nick Howe.

Host: Benjamin Thompson

And I’m Benjamin Thompson. See you next time.