Marie Curie

Marie Sklodowska-Curie, one of the few people to win two Noble Prizes in different fields, was one of the most significant researchers of radiation and its effects as a pioneer of radiology. Until her granddaughter recently had them decontaminated her notes were radioactive.

Marie Curie (Polish Maria Sklodowska-Curie, born November 7, 1867, died July 4, 1934) was a chemist pioneer in the early field of radiology and a two-time Nobel laureate. She also became the first woman ever appointed to teach at the Sorbonne. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, and spent her early years there, but in 1891 at age 24 moved to France to study science in Paris. She obtained all her higher degrees and conducted her scientific career there and became a naturalized French citizen. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw.

After finishing high school, she suffered a mental breakdown for a year. Due to her gender and Russian anti-Polish reprisals following the January Uprising, she was not allowed admission into any universities so she worked as a governess for several years. Eventually, with the monetary assistance of her elder sister, she moved to Paris and studied chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne, where she became the first woman to teach.

At the Sorbonne she met and married another instructor, Pierre Curie. Together they studied radioactive materials, particularly the uranium pitchblende ore, which had the curious property of being more radioactive than the uranium extracted from it. By 1898 they deduced a logical explanation: that the pitchblende contained traces of some unknown radioactive component which was far more radioactive than uranium; thus on December 26th Marie Curie announced the existence of this new substance.

Over several years of unceasing labour they refined several tons of pitchblende, progressively concentrating the radioactive components, and eventually isolated initially the chloride salts (refining radium chloride on April 20, 1902) and then two new chemical elements. The first they named polonium after Marie’s native country, and the other was named radium from its intense radioactivity.

Together with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903: “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel”. She was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

Eight years later, in 1911, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”. In an unusual move, Curie intentionally did not patent the radium isolation process, instead leaving it open so the scientific community could research unhindered.

In her later years, she was disappointed by the myriad of physicians and makers of cosmetics who used radioactive materials without precautions.

Her death near Sallanches in 1934 was from leukemia, almost certainly due to her massive exposure to radiation in her work.

Element 96 Curium (Cm) was named in her and Pierre’s honour.