Marie Curie
Marie Curie carried test tubes of radioactive isotopes loose in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, charmed by the faint light they gave off in the dark. She did not know the substances were slowly killing her. Today her papers from the 1890s are still too dangerous to handle. Even her cookbooks are highly radioactive, sealed in lead-lined boxes that researchers may open only in protective clothing. This is the woman who coined the word radioactivity, the only person ever to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. She was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, and she died Marie Curie in a French sanatorium in 1934. Between those two names lies a question. How did a Polish girl barred from university because she was a woman come to reorder the foundations of physics? And what did her discoveries cost her, in scandal, in heartbreak, and finally in her own bone marrow?
Bronisława Skłodowska ran a prestigious Warsaw boarding school for girls and resigned the post after Maria was born, the fifth and youngest child. She died of tuberculosis in May 1878, when Maria was ten. Less than three years earlier, Maria's oldest sibling, Zofia, had died of typhus caught from a boarder. These deaths pushed Maria, raised between an atheist father and a devout Catholic mother, to give up Catholicism and become agnostic. Władysław Skłodowski taught mathematics and physics, the very subjects his daughter would pursue. When Russian authorities stripped laboratory instruction from Polish schools, he carried the equipment home and taught his children to use it himself. The family had lost property and fortune through patriotic involvement in Polish uprisings against the Russian Empire, most recently the January Uprising of 1863 to 1865. That ruin condemned Maria and her siblings to a hard climb in life. Barred from regular higher education because she was a woman, Maria joined the clandestine Flying University, a Polish patriotic institution that admitted women. She graduated from a girls' gymnasium on the 12th of June 1883 with a gold medal, then collapsed for a year, possibly from depression, before returning to tutoring in Warsaw.
Maria made a pact with her elder sister Bronisława. She would fund Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, and two years later Bronisława would do the same for her. To honor it, Maria took work as a governess in Szczuki with the Żorawskis, relatives of her father, studying in her free time. There she fell in love with their son, Kazimierz Żorawski, a future eminent mathematician. His parents refused to let him marry a penniless relative, and he would not defy them. The loss was tragic for both. Żorawski earned his doctorate and rose to become a professor and rector of Kraków University. Yet as an old man, by then a mathematics professor at the Warsaw Polytechnic, he would sit contemplatively before the statue of Maria Skłodowska erected in 1935 outside the Radium Institute she had founded. Maria began her own practical scientific training between 1890 and 1891 in a chemistry laboratory at the Museum of Industry and Agriculture, near Warsaw's Old Town. The laboratory was run by her cousin Józef Boguski, who had once assisted the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev in Saint Petersburg.
In late 1891, aged 24, Maria left Poland for France and enrolled at the University of Paris. She rented a garret in the Latin Quarter and survived on almost nothing, wearing all the clothes she owned to stay warm through cold winters and sometimes forgetting to eat. She earned a degree in physics in 1893 and a second degree in 1894, studying by day and tutoring by night. A commission to investigate the magnetic properties of steels drew her toward a man named Pierre Curie, an instructor at the city's industrial physics and chemistry institution. The Polish physicist Józef Wierusz-Kowalski introduced them, knowing Maria needed laboratory space. Pierre proposed marriage, but she meant to return to Poland. He answered that he was ready to follow her there, even if it reduced him to teaching French. After Kraków University denied her a place because of sexism in academia, a letter from Pierre brought her back to Paris. On the 26th of July 1895, they married in Sceaux, refusing any religious service. Marie wore a dark blue outfit instead of a bridal gown, and it would serve her for years afterward as a laboratory outfit. A contemporary quip called her Pierre's biggest discovery.
Henri Becquerel discovered in 1896 that uranium salts gave off rays resembling X-rays, arising spontaneously from the uranium itself. Marie chose those uranium rays as the subject of a thesis. Her instrument was an electrometer her husband and his brother had built years earlier, sensitive enough to measure how the rays made surrounding air conduct electricity. Her first finding was decisive. The activity of uranium compounds depended only on the quantity of uranium present, which led her to a radical idea. The radiation must come from the atom itself, a step toward disproving the belief that atoms were indivisible. The minerals pitchblende and chalcolite measured far more active than uranium alone. So Marie reasoned they must hide an unknown substance more active still. On the 14th of April 1898, the Curies weighed out a 100-gram sample of pitchblende and ground it with a pestle and mortar, not yet realizing they would have to process tonnes of ore. In July 1898 they announced an element they named polonium, after her partitioned homeland. On the 26th of December 1898 came a second, radium, from the Latin word for ray. From a tonne of pitchblende, they separated one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride in 1902. She isolated pure radium metal in 1910 but never managed to isolate polonium, whose half-life is only 138 days.
In December 1903 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel. The committee had first intended to honor only the two men. A member and advocate for women scientists, the mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, warned Pierre, and after his complaint Marie's name was added. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. On the 19th of April 1906, walking across the Rue Dauphine in heavy rain, Pierre was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle and killed instantly. Devastated, Marie accepted the chair created for him and became the first woman to be a professor at the University of Paris. Then, in 1911, came two blows at once. The French Academy of Sciences failed by a vote or two to elect her, choosing instead Édouard Branly. That same year, a year-long affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, a married former student of Pierre's, broke into a press scandal. The tabloids cast her, in her mid-40s, as a foreign Jewish home-wrecker, and a mob gathered outside her house. The Royal Swedish Academy honored her anyway with the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. When the committee chair Svante Arrhenius urged her to stay away from the ceremony, she replied that there was no relation between her scientific work and the facts of her private life. She remains alone with Linus Pauling as a laureate in two fields.
During the First World War, Marie Curie reasoned that wounded soldiers were best served if operated on as soon as possible, and that field radiology near the front could spare limbs that surgeons would otherwise amputate. After a quick study of radiology, anatomy, and automotive mechanics, she built mobile radiography units that soldiers nicknamed petites Curies, the Little Curies. As director of the Red Cross Radiology Service, she set up France's first military radiology centre, operational by late 1914. Assisted at first by a military doctor and her 17-year-old daughter Irène, she oversaw 20 mobile vehicles and another 200 radiological units at field hospitals in the war's first year. In 1915 she produced hollow needles filled with radium emanation, a colorless radioactive gas later identified as radon, to sterilize infected tissue, drawn from her own one-gram supply. An estimated million wounded soldiers were treated with her X-ray units. She tried to donate her gold Nobel medals to the war effort, but the French National Bank refused them. So she bought war bonds with her prize money instead, saying the state needed it though she had no illusions the money would survive. For all of it, the French government never gave her any formal recognition.
Marie Curie died on the 4th of July 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, of aplastic anaemia believed to come from her long exposure to radiation damaging her bone marrow. The hazards of ionising radiation were unknown when she worked, without the safety measures developed later. When her body was exhumed in 1995, the French radiation protection office concluded she could not have been exposed to lethal levels of radium while alive, and pointed instead to her wartime radiography work. Her honesty matched her science. She returned a small scholarship in 1897 once she could earn her keep, gave away much of her first Nobel money, and refused to patent the radium-isolation process so others could research it freely. Albert Einstein reportedly said she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame. Her legacy multiplied. The institute she led produced four more Nobel laureates, including her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie, building the Curie family total to five Nobel Prizes. In 1995 her remains and Pierre's were moved to the Paris Panthéon, sealed in lead lining because of the radioactivity, making her the first woman honored there on her own merits. The synthetic element with atomic number 96, curium, carries her name into the periodic table she helped rewrite.
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Common questions
Who was Marie Curie and what did she discover?
Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867. With her husband Pierre Curie she discovered the elements polonium and radium, announced in 1898, and she coined the term radioactivity.
How many Nobel Prizes did Marie Curie win?
Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering radium and polonium. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and remains alone with Linus Pauling as a laureate in two scientific fields.
Why did Marie Curie name the element polonium?
Marie Curie named polonium after Poland, her native country, which at the time remained partitioned among the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian empires. She and Pierre announced the element in July 1898.
How did Marie Curie die?
Marie Curie died on the 4th of July 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, France, from aplastic anaemia. Her illness was believed to stem from long-term exposure to radiation, including her unprotected laboratory work and her wartime radiography service.
What did Marie Curie do during World War I?
During World War I, Marie Curie developed mobile radiography units known as petites Curies, or Little Curies, to bring X-ray services to field hospitals. She directed the Red Cross Radiology Service, oversaw 20 mobile vehicles and 200 radiological units in the war's first year, and an estimated million wounded soldiers were treated with her equipment.
Where is Marie Curie buried?
Marie Curie was first interred at the cemetery in Sceaux beside her husband Pierre. In 1995 their remains were transferred to the Paris Panthéon, sealed in lead lining because of the radioactivity, making her the first woman honored there on her own merits.