There are always new stories to be told about even the most familiar of icons. During the last century, the world's most famous female physicist was compressed into a variety of cardboard cut-out figures – the scientific martyr, the Jewish whore, the double Nobel Prize-winner, the steely obsessive – although modern schoolgirls associate her with a cancer charity and more traditionally feminine virtues of compassion and caring. These multiple roles are made still more complicated by the array of possible names. In a tribute to the Polish origins of which she was so proud, this woman is now often called Marie Skłodoswka Curie, but as Eva Hemmungs Wirtén discusses in her splendid new book, the available combinations of titles, surnames and initials were of more than symbolic significance: how she signed herself had practical consequences. The unexpected stereotypes who emerge from Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information include the savvy media manipulator, the ambitious opportunist and the hard-headed negotiator, all three constrained by old-fashioned legislation on women's rights.

Hemmungs Wirtén's overall aim is to study the past in order to learn about the present. To enhance understanding of modern scientific life, she explores the era of the Curies by intertwining three analytical threads of contemporary relevance: intellectual property, celebrity culture and the organization of knowledge. Rather than proceeding steadily through her subject's life, Hemmungs Wirtén adopts a more rewarding strategy of discussing four key episodes in considerable detail: discovering radium, the furore surrounding Curie's affair with Pierre Langevin, her two trips to America, and her less well-known participation in the League of Nations and its Committee on International Intellectual Cooperation (CICI). Although each of the four main chapters could stand as an individual paper in its own right, together they form a powerful and coherent argument, if at times somewhat leadened by academic sociology-speak. Making excellent use of relatively untapped primary sources, notably the extensive correspondence of Missy Brown Meloney preserved in the Paris Curie archive, Hemmungs Wirtén has succeeded in casting fresh light not only on Curie's own career but also on the development of modern attitudes towards ownership of knowledge about the natural world.

Making Marie Curie opens with her famous pronouncement that science should be interested in things, not in people; the tensions inherent in this dichotomy become a leitmotif recurring throughout the book. Hemmungs Wirtén closely examines the Curie couple's renowned refusal to patent their discoveries. Although by this stage the laws in Britain had been changed, in France wives were still non-people who belonged to their husbands and could not own property in their own right; it was only when she became a widow that Curie could in principle possess radium and bequeath it to her daughters. Curie could – and did – ensure that she was credited for originating intellectual ideas, such as inventing the label ‘radioactivity’, but she gradually and strategically retreated behind her husband's identity in establishing priority of discovery: as Hemmungs Wirtén shows, under these circumstances, the distinction between ‘we’ and ‘I’ can be crucial. Always short of money, the married couple derived part of their income from the patents Pierre and his brother had taken out on their electrical instruments, but as a wife Curie was not entitled to patent radium, which would have entailed demonstrating that it had an industrial application and so would be financially profitable. This perspective puts a new twist on her apparently noble declaration that the couple were disinterested searchers after scientific truth; or, in the eloquent phrasing that Meloney put into her mouth, radium was an element that belonged to everybody but should enrich nobody.

The Curie myth perpetuates images of her isolation as a lonely widow, but she leaned on several women, including her two daughters, the English electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton, and Meloney, who effectively became her PR agent for almost fifteen years. Hemmungs Wirtén convincingly establishes Meloney's crucial role in both the mythology and the life of Marie Curie, carefully picking apart the ambiguous implications of gift exchange between the two women and their two nations. Curie insisted that the fruits of her first tour be donated to her personally not as money but as radium, even though financially it would have made sense to shop around in Europe for a cheaper supply. At the last minute, she seems to have realized that if she were to die, her daughters would have to pay inheritance tax, but a bizarre sequence of lost letters and faulty memories obfuscates the historical picture still further. The two women were often talking at cross-purposes, but as one of Curie's greatest admirers Meloney gradually became one of her few intimate acquaintances.

Despite her claim that science is about things, not persons, Curie worked hard throughout her life to fashion her public image. Legally a non-person before Pierre's death, she nurtured her ephemeral existence as an independent persona, albeit in Pierre's shadow. Radium might not have belonged to the Curie couple, but the international unit of radioactivity bears their name, and she liberally gave permission for its attachment to schools and streets. Only when things went wrong did her Polish origins prevail: one of the accusations against Curie during the Langevin affair was that an unladylike immigrant had brought a hallowed French name into disrepute. Later reinstated as a French heroine, she considered suing a so-called Alfred Curie who was marketing the ubiquitous Tho-Radia range of radioactive cosmetics and perfumes. In this clearly written, thoroughly researched and originally oriented exposé, Hemmungs Wirtén reveals how Curie's own brand achieved far greater international recognition.