Marie Curie and President Warren Harding walk down the White...
Marie Curie and President Warren Harding walk down the White House steps arm in arm in 1921. (Library of Congress - More picture info)
I didn’t know about this episode:
Curie, who lived in France for much of her life, had done an interview with an American reporter named Marie Meloney the year before. In that interview, she told Meloney that she didn’t have any radium to continue her research and that she couldn’t afford any, writes Ann Lewicki in the journal Radiology. After a fundraising campaign led by American women, Curie travelled to the United States to be presented with one gram of radium by President Warren Harding on May 20, 1921.