Maria Rentezti has written a “biography” of radium: a history of radioactivity research as shaped by the economy of scarcity of its most prized element. The Viennese played a key role in this economy, thanks to the Habsburgs' monopoly over the uranium from the Bohemian mines at St. Joachimsthal. Rentetzi's starting point is the long-standing question of why women were overrepresented in radioactivity, relative to the field of physics as a whole. Others have credited influential individuals like Marie Curie with drawing women into the field, or pointed to the drudgery (and, we now know, danger) involved in preparing radium samples, which women may have been more willing to perform than men. With her focus on Vienna, Rentetzi tells a significantly new and compelling story, in which the history of radioactivity is, in large part, “a chapter in the urban reconstruction of the city” (83).

Rentetzi shows how politics and urban architecture created the conditions of possibility for a scientific culture in which women could thrive. The scene is the Mediziner-Viertel, the section of Vienna's ninth district that housed the Allgemeines Krankenhaus and several scientific laboratories—including the Radium Institute, founded in 1910 under the auspices of the Academy of Sciences. Under the influence of physicist Franz Exner, the Radium Institute developed a distinctively collaborative research style and a welcoming atmosphere for women. Drawing on architectural plans and laboratory photographs, Rentetzi convincingly shows how these qualities were embodied in the design of the institute—from the equality of the spaces assigned to male and female scientists to the provision of women's bathrooms. Looking beyond the institute's walls, Rentetzi argues that the layout of the Mediziner-Viertel as a whole allowed female scientists to take on pivotal roles within networks of intellectual and material exchange between radioactivity and related disciplines.

Radioactivity's history reveals important continuities in the politics of knowledge across the divide of 1918, between the liberalism of the fin de siècle and the radicalism of Red Vienna. Rentetzi argues that the same neighborhood that promoted interdisciplinary innovation and gender equality in the sciences at the turn of the century became central to the Socialist experiment of Red Vienna. By the 1920s, the Radium Institute was among several key scientific institutions in the Mediziner Viertel in which women thrived, and radium itself had a role in the Socialists' public health reforms under Julius Tandler. Although women physicists faced unprecedented opportunities after 1919, Rentetzi also makes clear the limits of their liberation, above all the impossibility of combining a career and family. Nonetheless, she shows that a blueprint for progressive science was laid down in the Mediziner Viertel in the first decade of the twentieth century, to be built up after World War I by the leaders of Red Vienna in their quest for social reform.

In identifying interdisciplinarity as a crucial strategy of women in radioactivity, Rentetzi builds on the work of colleagues who have shown that Marie Curie's connections to the radioelement industry and the medical field were essential to the success of her research laboratory. But Rentetzi goes beyond these studies theoretically by defining radium in new terms as a “trafficking material,” a network-building object. As such, radium served as a “Trojan horse” through which Austrian women skilled with radium could insert themselves into other disciplines and even other nations, hence adapting to the political quicksand of twentieth-century Europe. Rightly critical of the argument that radium research was inherently monotonous “women's work,” Rentetzi wants to “leave behind the days of bemoaning the ‘poor and excluded women’” (126). Many of these women, as Jews, were doubly marginalized in the 1930s. As outcasts and refugees, Rentetzi argues, they “took their lives and careers in their hands” and “altered the boundaries of their discipline” (181).

Nonetheless, Rentetzi makes clear that radium offered such opportunities for only a brief moment. By World War II, radium was being replaced in nuclear physics by radioisotopes, products of the giant accelerators that marked the end of an era when enterprising but resource-poor individuals could network their ways to productive careers. Paradigmatic of this transition was Marietta Blau, the subject of both Rentetzi's final chapter and a recent biography by Brigitte Strohmaier and Robert Rosner. In the early 1930s, Blau succeeded in developing a crucial method for visualizing nuclear disintegrations using photographic emulsions. Shortly thereafter, in the face of Nazi persecution and against the tide of “big science,” Blau fought for her career by reconstituting another staple of Radium Institute research, the scintillation counter. Blau's device was uniquely suited to use by non-physicists in industry and medicine: again, interdisciplinarity was a survival strategy. But Blau paid a high price for leaving academic physics. Like Lise Meitner, she was passed over for a Nobel Prize and essentially forgotten in Vienna until the past decade.

Strohmaier and Rosner's biography, originally published in German in 2003, has contributed to Blau's rehabilitation in Austria. It begins with a brief narrative of her life, including the twenty-two years she spent in Mexico and the United States, as well as her bittersweet return to Vienna ten years before her death in 1970. There follow reminiscences by her colleagues and students and a thorough account of her scientific research.

Thanks to the Gutenberg project, Rentetzi's book and its marvelous historical photographs are freely available online.