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WORK TITLE: Making Marie Curie
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Wirtén, Eva Hemmungs
BIRTHDATE: 1960
WEBSITE: http://www.evahemmungswirten.se/
CITY: Uppsala
STATE:
COUNTRY: Sweden
NATIONALITY: Swedish
https://www.isak.liu.se/temaq/medarbetare/presentation-eva-hemmungs-sve?l=en * http://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N94-1323
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 98071521
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n98071521
HEADING: Hemmungs WirteÌn, Eva
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PERSONAL
Born 1960, in Uppsala, Sweden.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Linköping University, Sweden, professor of mediated culture; ISHTIP (International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property), codirector with Fiona Macmillan, 2016-.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in 1960 in Uppsala, Sweden, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén is professor of mediated culture at Linköping University, Sweden. She has written three books on intellectual property, information, and celebrity culture. She and Fiona Macmillan are codirectors of ISHTIP (International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property), which was founded in 2008.
No Trespassing and Terms of Use
In 2004 Hemmungs Wirtén published No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization, an account of the development of intellectual property law and its application. The book offers three themes describing the scope of cultural ownership: authorship of print culture, the use of intellectual property rights as an instrument of control, and the globalization of both of these. Aimed at professionals and academics concerned with the politics of cultural production and dissemination of intellectual property rights in a globalized world, the book describes the rapid technological changes that have taken place in recent decades and the increased global interdependence of the informational value of intellectual property rights.
Hemmungs next published the 2008 Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons. Covering copyright and cultural expression, she describes how the digital revolution and ubiquitous use of the Internet have led to debate and conflict about content that should have copyright protection and content that is in the public domain. She begins with nineteenth-century versions of Web logs and wikis and moves to “creative commons;” then she uses an interdisciplinary approach in her treatment of the subject. She provides a conceptual foundation of the public domain, defending it as a form of the intellectual commons that should be protected from exploitation. Some diverse examples she explores are pharmaceutical uses of plants, the patenting of DNA sequences, and Disney’s reworking of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books. She explains how nature and culture have been transformed into intellectual property.
Making Marie Curie
Hemmungs Wirtén’s 2015 Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information focuses on the creation of Curie as a cultural icon. Rather than a biography of the scientist, Hemmungs Wirtén offers an examination of her career across two centuries and a world war to reveal how modern science combines with celebrity culture under the influence of intellectual property in the age of information. Curie’s popularity has not waned since her scientific achievements in the early twentieth century. In a New Scientist magazine poll in 2009, the French and Polish Curie was voted Most Inspirational Female Scientist of All Time, and she frequently is named a role model to women in scientific careers. Hemmungs Wirtén delves into the celebrity culture surrounding Curie considering her nationality, scientific achievements, marital status, and professional partnerships with husband Pierre Curie and colleague Henri Becquerel, all in the context of misogyny in the scientific community and the awarding of two Nobel Prizes.
Writing in the Women’s Review of Books, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt described how Hemmungs Wirtén explains the way the persona of Curie combined with her intellectual property to create a cultural construction of the legend and legacy of Marie Curie. From her work in the 1910s, Curie was seldom out of public view and maintained a celebrity persona while also trying to balance this construction with her desire for privacy. Kohlstedt contended: “It is the interweaving of the persona Curie cultivated, together with the conscious role she played on the international stage through her participation in the International Commission, [Hemmungs] Wirtén argues, that established Curie’s prominence in the historical record of twentieth-century science.”
The book offers information on scientific enterprise, the position of female scientists in the early twentieth century in Europe and America, and the development of modern attitudes towards ownership of information about the natural world. She also discusses intellectual property, shared research credit, evolution of the role of patents in the twentieth century, privacy, women’s rights and salaries, and Curie’s support for better acknowledgment of scientific innovation.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Women’s Review of Books, January-February, 2016, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, review of Making Marie Curie, p. 30.
ONLINE
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén Home Page, http://www.evahemmungswirten.se/ (March 31, 2017), author profile.
I'm Professor of Mediated Culture at Linköping University, Sweden. From July 2016 I'm also Co-Director of ISHTIP (International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property), together with Fiona Macmillan. A full CV in English (pdf) can be downloaded here.
The age of curie
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
The Women's Review of Books.
33.1 (January-February 2016): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Full Text:
Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information
By Eva Hemmungs Wirten
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, 248 pp., $35.00, hardcover
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Why not the Age of Curie? Citing polls and other evidence of the persisting fame of Marie Curie throughout the twentieth century to the present
day, Eva Hemmungs Wirten responds that Curie, because gender intervenes, is not as easily generalizable as Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and a few
other men whose names designate an era. Puzzling over that exclusion alongside the very evident fame of a woman whose name inevitably leads
polls naming women scientists results in a highly focused account of how the persona of Curie and her intellectual property intertwined--what
Wirten terms the cultural construction of Marie Curie. With two Nobel Prizes in hand (in 1903 shared with her husband Pierre and Henri
Becquerel, and independently in 1911), Curie was seldom out of public view. How she managed her celebrity, working to balance privacy with
the very strategic use of her visibility for particular causes, frames Wirten's account; she often finds that persisting interest in not only the persona
but also her personal life was a distraction difficult to ignore.
Readers should note that Wirten has already shown a deep interest in the concept of intellectual property in her book, Terms of Use: Negotiating
the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (2003). She seems to have been drawn to Curie because the scientist had both positioned herself in
relationship to the idea of proprietary rights to radium and, later in life, became active in the discussion about the property rights of intellectuals.
Although the book is somewhat bifurcated, as the subtitle suggests, with attention to the ways in which Curie worked during the first third of the
twentieth century both to shape her scientific and public persona and to frame the broader subject of scientific intellectual property, Wirten sees a
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close connection between these two endeavors. A quite specific link is created when, in the 1920s, Curie is drawn into official international
discussions about the issue of intellectual property at the same time that she becomes even more visible internationally through an extensive tour
of the United States. In the last decade of her life, Curie quite adroitly managed her personal and professional identities, revealed as the book
follows along parallel and then intersecting paths.
In the early twentieth century, intellectual property (whether operating through the legal regulation of patent, trademark, or copyright) was widely
discussed, as rules were put in place and later manipulated within and across national boundaries. For scientists educated in the nineteenth
century, like the Curies, the academic norm to embrace "science for science's sake" and to welcome open exchange of information was pervasive-
-but the principle became less tenable in a competitive environment of publishing priority and corporate secrecy. Thus, at the turn of the century,
the academically oriented Curies chose not to patent radium and even readily shared information about its preparation and effects. In Marie's
biography of her husband, Pierre Curie (1923), she takes appropriate credit for the "general scientific movement" in the dissemination and
application of their work and emphasizes that the couple refused to draw any profit from the discovery of radium. She wrote,
We took no copyright and published without
reserve all the results of our research, as well as
the exact processes of the preparation of radium.
In addition, we gave to those interested
whatever information they asked of us.
Academic scientists in the early twentieth century valued such disinterestedness and open intellectual exchange--although, as Wirten points out,
according to property law in France at the time, because Marie was a married woman, her property rights would have accrued to Pierre.
According to Helena M. Pycior, in her article "Reaping the benefits of collaboration while avoiding its pitfalls: Marie Curie's Rise to Scientific
Prominence," (in Social Studies of Science [1993]), Curie was astute about demonstrating her independent intellectual achievements and
published some results in her own name, even as Pierre's results on radium were always published with joint authorship. The decision to be open
about their work was mutual, and indeed "I" and "we" occur quite interchangeably in Marie's discussion of lives that were intimately intertwined.
Nonetheless, their informal possessiveness with regard to radium would remain evident throughout their careers and become more complicated as
an elaborate industry grew up around the discovery and its applications.
One counterpart to the selfless sharing of information about radium was the problem of acquiring that valuable substance for further research.
Thus when the journalist Missy Meloney offered to coordinate a US trip in 1921 for Marie, by this time widowed, with the promise of securing
from admirers a gram of radium for her research, a new alliance was created. Publicizing the significant and generous openness of the famous
physicist, Meloney stressed both the exceptional intellectual achievements of the two-time Nobel Prize winner and the petites curies, mobile xray
units that had been deployed at the front lines during World War I, with Curie herself involved in training soldiers how to use them. The
previously reclusive Curie emerged as a woman of multiple dimensions and intentions, even as she tried to keep her personal life private.
The challenges in an "age of information" proliferated, and in the 1920s Curie engaged closely with two specific, interrelated issues regarding
intellectual property. One was providing open access to scientific ideas and data through an international bibliography, and the other was
establishing the rights of those who made creative discoveries. In the aftermath of World War I, the League of Nations sought to disestablish
arbitrary and incompatible laws with more universal principles. Curie, along with eleven other scholars and diplomats, including Albert Einstein,
was named to the League's International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation in 1922.
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The group identified a number of concerns. Perhaps the most agreed upon, although difficult to implement, was that of the creation of a scientific
bibliography that would be consistently maintained, complementing other bibliographical efforts already in place, often on the national level.
Updating access to publications throughout the world would minimize duplication and establish individual priority. More challenging was the
issue of scientists' right to benefit from their discoveries. French intellectuals such as the physicist Paul Langevin believed that scientists' creative
work was similar to that of artists in its moral and practical value. The French government had already recognized that artists often did not reap
the profits from the resale value of their work, and established the droit de suite--an extended right to benefit from such sales. Recognizing how
much corporations, including the radium industry, benefited from scientific discoveries, some scientists sought a similar solution. Members of the
international commission, however, had several concerns about how to apply such a right and what it would mean for the field.
In what Wirten presents as a curious reversal of the early decision by the Curies to share their research results relating to radium, Marie Curie
advocated more protection of scientific intellectual property. Wirten ponders the question of what motivated Curie's shifting position, given her
longstanding interest in the intellectual commons. Certainly her struggle to gain adequate research support, which led her to the American tour,
might have been a factor. French law did more than the British and American systems to protect individual rights, so the precedents Curie knew
best may also have contributed to that position. Even in France, however, there was not a uniform stance, and some colleagues did not support
Curie's direct request for support before the Academy of Medicine in 1931. What Wirten calls Curie's "impossible notion of scientific property"
was not achieved in France or by the commission, and thus the outcome remains a kind of enigma in the biography of Curie.
The role of patents changed in the twentieth century, as industrial leaders positioned themselves to take advantage of scientific discovery.
Moreover, scientists often patented instruments, if not their discoveries, as had Pierre Curie, providing important income to his wife and
daughters after his death. Thus, creating mechanisms to gain financially for personal needs or additional research was an idea scientists
themselves put in play. Counterarguments were strong, however, given the longstanding norm of sharing research outcomes evidenced in the
publication activities of scientific societies, the cumulative and collaborative nature of much scientific work, and the complexity of how and
whom to charge for use of a scientific discovery. Curie's support for some better acknowledgment of scientific innovation is clear, but how she
debated these issues during the meetings of the commission is not recorded.
This book is not a biography. Susan Quinn has already written the most authoritative account to date, Marie Curie: A Life (1995), and there are
numerous other essays and books that examine Curie's life and times. Wirten provides an extensive and useful bibliographical essay as a guide
through that literature. What this volume offers is insight into how Curie herself took charge of her intellectual property, including her own
persona--both shaping and reflecting a rapidly changing world, in which a new capacity for celebrity raised fresh challenges about the
management of information. It is the interweaving of the persona Curie cultivated, together with the conscious role she played on the
international stage through her participation in the International Commission, Wirten argues, that established Curie's prominence in the historical
record of twentieth-century science. Those wanting to learn more about Curie's scientific achievements will need to read one of the longer
biographies, but this account offers a fresh perspective on Curie's strength as an institution builder, a networked collaborator, and a woman quite
aware and protective of her own intellectual property. In sum, her intellectual achievements and career contributions together offer a profile that
indeed justifies thinking of the early twentieth century as the Age of Curie.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is a historian of science at the University of Minnesota. She studies science as it intersects with various publics in
museums, schools, and the media, and recently published an edited volume with David Kaiser, Science in the American Century (2013).
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. "The age of curie." The Women's Review of Books, Jan.-Feb. 2016, p. 30+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA441765922&it=r&asid=6d3fb678eee3f9b94cffcb082abf18d8. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A441765922