Marie Curie

By peace | November 13, 2011

Marie Curie (1867 - 1934)

Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish-born chemist, who worked in France. Marie Curie and her husband Pierre were a remarkable scientific team, who struggled for many years to discover the secrets of radioactivity.

Marie was born Manya Sklodowska, in Warsaw, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. In 1891 Marie went to the Aorbonne in Paris, to study chemistry, living in poverty in the students quarter. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, who worked with her in the university laboratory.

In 1897, Henri Becquerel, a colleague of theirs discovered mysterious emissions of invisible rays from uranium. Marie Curie devised the first method of measuring them, calling them radioactivity. She and Pierre searched for other sources, and came to the conclusion that pitchblende, the ore from which uranium is taken, contains two other radioactive elements. One they called polonium, the other radium.

The scientific world was skeptical, and the Curies struggled for four years to isolate enough pure radium to establish their case. Their equipment was primitive, their private laboratory a leaky shed, and the massive amounts of ore they required ate into their meagre finances. FInally in 1902 they had enough o fate material, pale-blue with the phosphorescence of its radioactivity, to convince the world.

Pierre had turned down a professorship at Geneva to continue working with Marie: in 1904 he became Professor at the Sorbonne. In 1903 the Curies and Becquerel were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. In April 1906, Pierre was run over and killed. This was a bitter blow to Marie, but she worked on, receiving the honor of being the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne when she was appointed to Pierre’s professorship.

In 1911 Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, for the discovery of radium and polonium; the firs person to be honored with two such awards. Subsequently, her work concentrated on the medical uses of radium in cancer therapy increasingly helped by her daughter Irene and Irene’s husband, the brilliant Frederic Joliot, who formed a research team like Marie and Pierre.

Aware of the dangerous potential of radioactivity in the wrong hands, Marie stressed the peaceful and beneficial side. She always freely published her results, for the sake of science, and gained no financial profit from them. She paid the ultimate price for her pioneering and selfless devotion to scientific study: she died in 1934 of leukemia brought on by her prolonged exposure to radiation.

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