A young woman sits at a laboratory table full of glass bottles and Erlenmeyer flasks. She is wearing a lab coat full of holes, throwing a piercing look at the camera. ‘That’s your grandmother,’ Anna van Suchtelen is told on her 11th birthday, ‘your grandfather took that picture’. She has never heard of this grandmother before. All she knows is that Helenka was born in 1887 in Russian-occupied Poland and that she studied physics and chemistry in Switzerland. Years later, Anna van Suchtelen decides to uncover the story of this headstrong woman who considered Marie Curie as her role model. Her research leads her to Kyiv, Warsaw, Zurich, Sweden – ending in Amsterdam. Helenka turns out to have been a committed student, and a brilliant scientist. She was a mother who wanted to make a career in the turbulent context of scientific breakthroughs and women’s emancipation, all the while living through war and the Russian Revolution.