Marie Curie discovered the vaccinations against diseases like Rabies and Anthrax
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Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, and Classic Scientist Biopics
By Karen A. Rader | May 31, 2007
In the heyday of the studio system, Hollywood enthusiastically embraced the biopic. But a glance through the list of American film biographies made during the late 1930s and early 1940s—compiled by George Custen in his landmark book Bio/Pics—reveals something unexpected about this trend. Many early films in this genre portray the lives of historically well-known research scientists. These included Marie Curie (who discovered radium), Paul Ehrlich (who found the cure for syphilis), Louis Pasteur (who developed vaccines for rabies and anthrax), and Thomas Edison (who invented the electric light).
One must wonder how some of the most significant American directors, writers, and actors became involved in the project of making mainstream commercial movies about what were viewed by most as decidedly unglamorous, laboratory-bound lives. Understanding how this string of scientist biopics came to be illuminates much about the history of entertainment and popular science, as well as the social and political dimensions of scientific research in the interwar period.
In the 1930s, scientist biopics (according to Alberto Elena) “became true forerunners of the genre in the United States.” In 1939 and 1940 alone, Hollywood produced the same number of films about scientists as it did during the entire subsequent decade. Paul Rotha, in a 1992 New Scientist article, suggested that ideological legitimation provided the motive. In the politically unstable 1930s and 1940s, Rotha argued, filmmakers made “earnest and vigorous attempts to convince the electorate of the possibility of a national society based on science and education.”
But a closer look at films like Madame Curie (1943) and The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935) suggests that their creation was not quite so straightforward. In their portrayal of science as a powerful force for social change, these two films effectively exemplify the old-guard Hollywood elite’s liberal, politically progressive vision for the future of the country—a vision that was not without opponents. In the context of World War II, American scientists and filmmakers alike would have viewed contemporary clashes between reform movements and entrenched religious and political beliefs as the most powerful epics of their times. During the war against Nazis and fascism, in a time of home-front campaigns seeking to convince Americans of the need for public health measures like vaccinations, the lives of Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur could stand as models of the way that reason and persistence could engage with and ultimately prevail over orthodoxy and militaristic brute force.