November 7th Birthday

Marie Skłodowska Curie

Born November 7, 1867. Died July 4, 1934. She was a physicist and chemist of Polish upbringing and, subsequently, French citizenship. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the first person (male or female) honored with two Nobel Prizes, and the first female professor at the University of Paris.

Her achievements include the creation of a theory of radioactivity (a term coined by her), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium. It was also under her personal direction that the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms (cancers), using radioactive isotopes.

In 1893 Madame Curie obtained a degree in physics and began work in an industrial laboratory. Meanwhile she continued studying at the Sorbonne and in 1894 earned a degree in mathematics. In the same year Pierre Curie entered her life. He was an instructor in the School of Physics and Chemistry, the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI). Madame Curie had begun her scientific career in Paris with an investigation of the magnetic properties of various steels; it was their mutual interest in magnetism that drew the then Marie Skłodowska and Pierre Curie together.


Pierre Curie

In July 1895, she and Pierre Curie married, and thereafter the two physicists hardly ever left their laboratory. Their shared hobbies were only long bicycle trips and journeys abroad, which brought them even closer. Maria had found a new love, a partner and scientific collaborator that she could depend on.

Due to the Henri Becquerel discovery of 1896, Madame Curie decided to look into uranium rays as a possible field of research for a thesis. She used a clever technique to investigate samples. Fifteen years earlier, her husband and his brother had invented the electrometer, a sensitive device for measuring electrical charge. Using the Curie electrometer, she discovered that uranium rays caused the air around a sample to conduct electricity. Her first result, using this technique, was the finding that the activity of the uranium compounds depended only on the amount of uranium present. She had shown that the radiation was not the outcome of some interaction between molecules but must come from the atom itself. In scientific terms, this was the most important single piece of work that she carried out.

Madame Curie's systematic studies had included two uranium minerals, pitchblende and torbernite. Her electrometer showed that pitchblende was four times as active as uranium itself, and chalcolite twice as active. She concluded that, if her earlier results relating the amount of uranium to its activity were correct, then these two minerals must contain small amounts of some other substance far more active than uranium itself.

In her systematic search for other substances besides uranium salts that emitted radiation, Madame Curie had found that the element thorium was likewise radioactive.

In July 1898, Pierre and Marie Curie together published a paper announcing the existence of an element which they named "polonium," in honor of her native Poland, which would for another twenty years remain partitioned among three empires. On 26 December 1898, the Curies announced the existence of a second element, which they named "radium" for its intense radioactivity; a word that they coined.

To achieve the isolation of radium, the Curies undertook the arduous task of separating out radium salt by differential crystallization. From a ton of pitchblende, one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride was separated in 1902. By 1910 Madame Curie, working on without her husband, who had been killed in 1906, had isolated the pure radium metal.

In an unusual decision, Marie Skłodowska–Curie intentionally refrained from patenting the radium-isolation process so that the scientific community could do research unhindered.

Since they were unaware of the deleterious effects of radiation exposure attendant on their chronic unprotected work with radioactive substances, the Curies had no idea what price they were paying for their research.

In 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel."

Madame Curie and her husband were unable to go to Stockholm to receive the prize in person, but they shared its financial proceeds with needy acquaintances, including students.

On receiving the Nobel Prize, Marie and Pierre Curie suddenly became very famous. The Sorbonne gave Pierre a professorship and permitted him to establish his own laboratory, in which Madame Curie became director of research.

In 1897 and 1904, respectively, Madame Curie gave birth to their daughters, Irène and Eve Curie. She later hired Polish governesses to teach them her native language, and send or take them on visits to Poland.

Madame Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Eight years later, she would receive the 1911 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."

Madame Curie was therefore the first person to win or share two Nobel Prizes. She is one of only two people who have been awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields, the other being Linus Pauling (Chemistry, Peace). Nevertheless in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences refused to abandon its prejudice against women and she failed by two votes to be elected to membership, losing to Édouard Branly, an inventor who had helped Guglielmo Marconi develop the wireless telegraph. It would be her doctoral student, Marguerite Perey, who would be the first woman elected to the Academy; in 1962, over half a century later.

On April 19, 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident. Walking across the Rue Dauphine in heavy rain, he was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle and fell under its wheels, fracturing his skull. While it has been speculated that he may previously have been weakened by prolonged radiation exposure, it has not been proven that this was the cause of the accident.

Madame Curie was devastated by her husband's death. She noted that as of that moment she had suddenly become "an incurably and wretchedly lonely person." On May 13, 1906, the Sorbonne physics department decided to retain the chair that had been created for Pierre Curie and entrusted it to Madame Curie together with full authority over the laboratory. This allowed her to emerge from Pierre's shadow. She became the first female professor at the Sorbonne, and sought in her exhausting work regime a meaning for her life.

In 1911, it transpired that in 1910–11 Marie Curie had conducted an affair of about a year's duration with physicist Paul Langevin, an ex-student of Pierre Curie's; a married man who had left his wife. This resulted in a press scandal, exploited by her academic opponents. Despite her fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude tended toward xenophobia—the same that had led to the Dreyfus Affair and that now fueled false speculation that Marie Skłodowska–Curie was Jewish. Five years Langevin's senior, she was portrayed in the tabloids as a home-wrecker. Later, Madame Curie's granddaughter, Hélène Joliot, married Langevin's grandson, Michel Langevin.













Paul Langevin - Friend with benefits?

During World War I, Madame Curie pushed for the use of mobile radiography units, which came to be popularly known as petites Curies ("Little Curies"), for the treatment of wounded soldiers. These units were powered using tubes of radium emanation, a colorless, radioactive gas given off by radium, later identified as radon. Madame Curie personally provided the tubes, derived from the radium she purified. Also, promptly after the war started, she donated her and her husband's gold Nobel Prize medals for the war effort.

In 1921, Madame Curie toured the United States, where she was welcomed triumphantly, to raise funds for research on radium. These distractions from her scientific labors, and the attendant publicity, caused her much discomfort but provided resources for her work. Her second American tour in 1929 succeeded in equipping the Warsaw Radium Institute, founded in 1925 with her sister Bronisława as director.

In her later years, Madame Curie headed the Pasteur Institute and a radioactivity laboratory created for her by the University of Paris.

Marie Skłodowska–Curie visited Poland a last time in the spring of 1934.

Only a couple of months later, she died. Her death on July 4, 1934, at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, in Haute-Savoie, eastern France, was from aplastic anemia, almost certainly contracted from exposure to radiation. The damaging effects of ionizing radiation were then not yet known, and much of her work had been carried out in a shed without any safety measures. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the pretty blue-green light that the substances gave off in the dark.

She was interred at the cemetery in Sceaux, alongside her beloved husband Pierre. Sixty years later, in 1995, in honor of their achievements, the remains of both were transferred to the Paris Panthéon. She became the first woman so honored.

Her laboratory is preserved at the Musée Curie.

Due to their levels of radioactivity, her papers from the 1890s (and even her cookbook) are considered too dangerous to handle. They are kept in lead-lined boxes; those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing.

The Curies' work contributed substantially to shaping the world of the 20th and 21st centuries, in both its physical and societal aspects. If the work of Maria Skłodowska–Curie helped overturn established ideas in physics and chemistry, it has had an equally profound effect in the societal sphere. In order to attain her scientific achievements, she had to overcome barriers that were placed in her way as a woman in both her country of origin and her adoptive country. This aspect of her life and career is highlighted in Françoise Giroud's Marie Curie: A Life, which emphasizes Skłodowska's role as a feminist precursor. She was ahead of her time, emancipated, independent, and in addition uncorrupted. Albert Einstein is supposed to have remarked that she was probably the only person who was not corrupted by the fame that she had won.

On my own personal level, Marie Curie has always been ingrained in my psyche as the larger of giants amongst giants. Not only of science, but of humanity. Her gentle yet proudly feminine nature has confounded many a belligerent chauvinist. Yet her approach, and much of her success, can be attributed to good old common sense. There must be thanks to Pierre's fabled electrometer, indeed, but the conclusions drawn were hers and therefore the profundity should be hers to a great extent.

In any case, while acquiescing to the standard present in her day, and in my mind today, she is the Mother of Modern Science.

Repose en paix Madame Curie pour votre valeur est au-delà de l'estimation. Vous appartenez à l'âge maintenant. Vous êtes debout à côté de la Ioniens