Marie Curie

Polish physicist

• Born: November 7, 1867; Warsaw, Russia (now Poland)
• Died: July 4, 1934; Savoy, France

Polish physicist and chemist Marie Curie conducted pioneering research into radioactivity. She and her husband, Pierre Curie, discovered the radioactive elements radium and polonium. Curie was the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize, which she received in both 1903 and 1911.

Also known as: Maria Salomea Sklodowska; Madame Curie

Primary field: Physics; chemistry

Specialties: Nuclear physics; radiochemistry

Early Life

Marie Curie was born Maria Sklodowska on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Russia (now Poland). Her father, Wladyslaw Sklodowska, was the director of a secondary school, and her mother, Bronislawa Boguska Sklodowska, was the headmistress of a girls’ school.

Curie excelled at her studies. Despite winning awards for her scholastic achievements, Curie was unprepared to attend a Polish university when she graduated from secondary school at the age of fifteen. In Poland, girls were not taught the prerequisite subjects, so she had to leave the country to further her formal education. She decided to attend university in France.

By the time Curie had earned enough money to travel to France, by working as a teacher and a governess, she was twenty-four years old. She traveled to Paris in 1891 and enrolled at the Sorbonne (University of Paris), one of the few European universities that permitted women to attend. Curie adopted the name Marie, the French equivalent of Maria, and mastered the French language so that she could understand her lectures on physics and other sciences.

After eighteen months at the Sorbonne, Curie took her final exams, scoring top in her class. She received a degree in physics, the first woman at the Sorbonne to do so. An opportunity to earn a second degree presented itself when Curie received a scholarship from Poland. She reenrolled at the Sorbonne, and earned a degree in mathematics in 1894.

While Curie was studying at the Sorbonne, she met Pierre Curie, a professor at Sorbonne’s school of physics. The two formed a friendship and began courting. After much deliberation over whether or not to return to Poland, Marie chose to stay in Paris to be with Pierre. They married on July 26, 1895.

Life’s Work

Shortly after her honeymoon, Curie joined her husband at the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris, where she began research into magnetism. Her presence impressed the faculty that a woman could have the fortitude to perform laboratory experiments and present meticulous results. In September 1897, Curie had her first child, Irène. Preparing her research for publication while raising her newborn daughter, she released her studies on the magnetic properties of steel on April 12, 1898.

Curie next pursued a doctoral degree in physics. She took an interest in X-rays, selecting them as the subject of her doctoral thesis. X-rays had been discovered by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen in 1895 when he made a cardboard-encased vacuum tube produce light against a wall with the application of electricity. He believed these X-rays were invisible rays of light able to pass through solid objects. The French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel then discovered that the element uranium produced X-rays without the aid of electricity. It was uranium that became the focus of Curie’s research.

In a storeroom at the School of Physics and Chemistry, Curie conducted her experiments on uranium using an electrometer. She first determined that the strength of X-rays depended on the amount of uranium present in a chemical compound. This led to her hypothesis that X-rays were created by an atom’s internal process, rather than the configuration of atoms in a molecule. Next, she determined that thorium was the only other element besides uranium to emit X-rays. She soon discovered that X-rays emitted by a mineral called uraninite, or pitchblende, were four times stronger than they should have been for the amount of uranium and thorium contained in pitchblende. She concluded that a previously undiscovered element was present in her sample.

With her husband assisting her, Curie spent long hours in a small, poorly ventilated workshop grinding down pitchblende slag to find the mysterious element. In the summer of 1898, the Curies were able to isolate the element, which Curie named polonium. In December 1898 the Curies isolated another new element from pitchblende. Using the term radioactivity to describe the rays it emitted, they determined that it was even more radioactive than polonium. They named this element radium.

Curie’s discoveries met with skepticism until 1902, when she was able to distill enough pure radium to prove that the element existed. The Curies were unaware of the negative effects of radium on their health, however. By the time Curie had completed her thesis on radioactivity and was awarded her doctoral degree in 1903, becoming the first woman in Europe to receive one, both she and Pierre had begun to suffer from radiation sickness.

In December 1903, the Curies were honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. Curie was the first woman to be presented with a Nobel Prize. In 1904, Pierre was offered a professorship at the Sorbonne. His wife became his laboratory chief and returned to her research on radium.

Curie gave birth to her second daughter, Eve, in December 1904. At the time, she was weakened from years of exposure to radium. She was also juggling motherhood with her work at the Sorbonne and as a teacher at a girls’ school. On April 19, 1906, Pierre was killed in a carriage accident. Being the only person qualified to assume Pierre Curie’s vacant post at the Sorbonne, Curie took over his classes. She was the first woman to lecture there, filling the lecture halls with the press and curious onlookers as well as students.

Curie continued her research on radium, eventually developing a means to measure its purity and isolate it in metallic form. Her lifetime of work on radium won her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, in addition to numerous awards and honorary memberships.

Curie’s next goal was to create a school that would be the central location of the newest and most intensive research on radium. The Pasteur Institute for Medical Research funded Curie’s Radium Institute in Paris, because radiation had been found to diminish cancerous tumors. The institute’s construction was completed in 1914, at the start of World War I. Curie took advantage of her knowledge of X-rays and devoted herself to the war effort by organizing and running mobile X-ray units on the battlefield. The Radium Institute opened at the end of the war in 1918. Curie also founded the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932. She worked at the institute in Paris until May 1934, when she became bedridden. Radiation exposure had taken its toll, and she had developed leukemia. Curie died on July 4, 1934, at the age of sixty-six.

Impact

Since X-rays were first discovered in 1895, the use of radiation has extended to the medical field as a tool for looking inside the human body and for radiation therapy to treat cancer. Radioactivity has numerous uses in other fields as well. Curie’s Radium Institute, renamed the Curie Institute after her death, became one of the world’s leading medical and biophysical research centers and also operates as a cancer treatment hospital. The Curie Institute in Warsaw was renamed the Maria Sklodowska-Curie Institute of Oncology after World War II. It has since become the leading cancer research and treatment center in Poland. A group in the United Kingdom operates a charity in her name with the permission of her daughter Eve; founded in 1948 as the Marie Curie International Memorial, it was later known as the Marie Curie Memorial Foundation and then simply as Marie Curie. The charity provides support for terminally ill patients and their families.

Although Curie is known for her discovery of radium, her influence extends beyond the science of radioactivity. Curie advanced the credibility of female scientists in an era when gender equality did not exist. By teaching women to educate themselves in subjects formerly reserved for men, she paved the way for women to enter the physical sciences. Her daughter, Irene, won her own Nobel Prize in 1935 for the discovery of artificial radiation.

The Marie Curie Fellowship was named in Curie’s honor. The research grant is awarded by the European Commission to pre- and postdoctoral researchers in various disciplines. The curie, a basic unit of measurement for radioactivity, was named in honor of the Curies as well, although it was later replaced by an International System of Units (SI) unit named for Becquerel. In 2011, on the centennial of her second Nobel Prize, a bridge in Warsaw was named in her honor and a commemorative mural painted on her birthplace.

Bibliography

Emling, Shelley. Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science's First Family. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Print.

Goldsmith, Barbara. Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.

Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey. Marie Curie: A Biography. Amherst: Prometheus, 2010. Print.

Segrè, Emilio. From X-rays to Quarks: Modern Physicist and Their Discoveries. 1980. Mineola: Dover, 2007.

Walter, Alan E., and Hélène Langevin-Joliot. Radiation and Modern Life: Fulfilling Marie Curie’s Dream. Amherst: Prometheus, 2004.