A Diagnosis of the Curies : GRAND OBSESSION Madame Marie Curie and Her World <i> by Rosalynd Pflaum (Doubleday: $22.50; 496 pp, illustrated </i>

Rosalynd Pflaum’s “Grand Obsession: Marie Curie and Her World” is a series of overlapping biographies of Marie and Pierre Curie, their daughter, Irene, and her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie. All Nobel Laureates, they dominated the field of radioactivity in France during the first half of this century.

Feminists will be disappointed. Despite the lip-service Pflaum pays to the slights and institutional obstacles that being female visited upon the distaff Curies, she writes about scientists who happened to be women, rather than women scientists. Moreover, she describes both Marie and Irene Curie in the contexts of their marriages. She does not even elaborate on the matter of nomenclature--the apparently painless transformation of Manya Sklodowska, a fervent Polish nationalist--to Marie Curie when she married the French chemist. In contrast, a generation later, Frederic Joliot, enamored of his wife’s lineage, went the extra mile to hyphenate her name with his, becoming Joliot-Curie.

Pflaum has set herself a difficult task in this thoroughly researched book. She presents four separate biographies, explains the lives of her subjects in the context of the science as well as the social history of their times, and addresses earlier biographers and critics in an effort to set the record straight. The result is uneven, a book rich in detail, scientifically literate but occasionally naive.

Pflaum focuses on issues that dominated contemporary headlines, including the alleged affair between Marie Curie and her colleague Paul Langevin in 1911 and, a generation later, on the turmoil over Frederic Joliot-Curie’s activities during the German occupation (when he had the opportunity to escape France and refused to leave). Pflaum reflects on these issues, recapitulates the old gossip as well as the evidence, but sheds little new light.

She is at her best in her cameo portrait of Dr. Eugene Curie, Pierre’s free-thinking father, who lived with them and who remained, after Pierre’s horrific death beneath the wheels of a wagon on the rue Dauphine, to care for their small daughters. Later, Pflaum presents a vivid picture of the World War I front to which Marie, with her then-teen-aged daughter Irene at her side, had lugged her X-ray machine to help treat the wounded.

Pflaum follows the early years of nuclear research in the makeshift laboratory where Marie single-mindedly and patiently separated a few grams of radium out of the literally tons of pitchblende she had had dumped in the yard outside. Never, it seems, did the Curies seriously question the wisdom of working with radioactive materials, not even after each of them in turn showed symptoms of extreme fatigue and unhealing sores that signal disease.

The Curies believed that the discovery of radioactivity would enhance human life, and in its early years, X-rays did seem only a boon to medicine; radiation therapy had not yet revealed a dark side. A generation later, with the explosions over Japan, Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie felt betrayed by their American colleagues. To them, science was unequivocally a force for good, and they did not seem to comprehend how their work could be interpreted as an evil genie released to wreak universal havoc.

Pflaum captures the international spirit of science in a world before people needed passports to travel and Nobel Prizes, still new, were accepted in the spirit of pacifism. The Curies, not alone, believed in “pure” science. Their ambitions took the form of a desire for recognition, for professorships, appointments, and financial subvention of their research. But they did not seek patents or the creation of personal fortunes. Even their Nobel money, never inconsequential, was spent on their work, or on domestic assistance so that they could work even harder.

Pflaum projects mixed feelings about her subjects. In one paragraph, she admires Marie: “An amazing, brilliant woman, whose doggedness and stubbornness had overcome immense hardships.” Then she adds, gratuitously, “But she was never the genius Pierre was.”

Brilliant but not a genius? How does one measure the difference? Perhaps Pflaum is registering distaste for the woman she portrays as monomaniacal and humorless, whose children were saved from neglect only by their good fortune in having a benevolent grandfather. Yet both daughters seem to have matured into productive women with deep affection for their mother.

Biographers do not have to like their subjects, but Pflaum wavers between making judgments and making excuses for hers. Discussing the Langevin affair, she feels obliged to remind the reader that Marie was only 39 when she was widowed, and had a healthy interest in men. When documenting Marie’s arranging for Irene to get a position at the Curie Institute, Pflaum dismisses the irregularity, writing that “Scientists are not saints.” Few of us think they are.

Referring to Frederic’s actions during the Nazi occupation when he worked with German scientists in his laboratory by day and, a Communist, fought with the Resistance by night, she asserts, “But those who never lived in an occupied country cannot, especially in retrospect, pass judgment on those who have.” This is a peculiar statement on two accounts: She does not make any sort of case for Joliot-Curie’s culpability, and if there was one, surely historians as well as all people of good will have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to judge human behavior in difficult times.

With the Curies now gone, it is a good time to review the special role they played in the creation of a nuclear-shadowed world. Pflaum presents a generous portrait that they probably would have accepted as fair.

I suspect that they would have objected, however, to the jacket copy, which says that the family won three Nobel Prizes in two generations. The number is five. Individuals who share the award do not receive half a prize, even when they happen to be married to each other.

Kevles is author of “The Females of the Species” (Harvard University Press).