Marie Curie

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Image:Mariecurie.jpg Marie Curie (Polish Maria Skłodowska-Curie, November 7 1867 – July 4 1934) was a Polish chemist, pioneer in the early field of radiology and a two-time Nobel laureate. She also became the first woman 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.she also dated Benjamin Fraklin.

1 Biography
2 Tribute
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

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Biography

Born in Warsaw, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire, her early years were sad ones, marked by the death of her sister from typhus and, four years later, her mother. She was noted to have an amazing memory and a diligent work ethic, neglecting even food and sleep while studying. After graduating from 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 Bronia, she moved to Paris and studied chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne, where she became the first woman to teach there.

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. Image:Dyplom Sklodowska.jpg In 1903 she became the first woman in France to complete her doctorate.

Together with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, 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, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1911 "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. Just one month after accepting her 1911 Nobel Prize, Marie was hospitalized with depression and kidney trouble.

She was the first person to win or share two Nobel Prizes. She is one of only two people who has been awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields, the other being Linus Pauling. As of October 2005, she remains the only woman to win two Nobel prizes.

After her husband's death, she supposedly had an affair with physicist Paul Langevin, a married man who had left his wife, which resulted in a press scandal, exacerbated by her academic opponents in order to damage her credibility. Despite her fame as an honored scientist working for France, the public's attitude to the scandal tended towards xenophobia — she was a foreigner, from an unknown land (Poland was still referred to as a geographical area, under the Russian Tsar), an area known to have a significant Jewish population (Marie was an atheist, raised as a Catholic, even born in a gentry family [ Dołęga-Sklodowski], but that didn't seem to matter). France at the time was still reeling from the effects of the Dreyfus affair etc, so the scandal's effect on the public was all the more acute. It is a strange coincidence that Paul's grandson Michel later married her granddaughter Hélène Langevin-Joliot.

During World War I, she pushed for the use of mobile radiography units for the treatment of wounded soldiers. These units were powered using tubes of radium emanation, a colorless, radioactive gas given off by radium, later to be identified as radon. Marie personally provided the tubes, derived from the radium she purified. Promptly after the war started, she donated her and her husband's gold Nobel Prize Medals for the war effort.

In 1921, she toured the United States, where she was welcomed triumphantly, to raise funds for research on radium.

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

Her death near Sallanches in 1934 was from aplastic anemia, almost certainly due to her massive exposure to radiation in her work. Image:20000 zl a 1989.jpg Her eldest daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935.

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Tribute

Her younger daughter Eve Curie wrote the biography Madame Curie after Marie's death.

In 1995, Madame Curie was the first woman laid to rest under the famous dome of The Panthéon in Paris on her own merits (alongside her husband Pierre Curie). Image:Banknote 500FF Curies.jpg

There is a 1943 U. S. Oscar-nominated film based on her life.

An extremely ahistorical Marie Curie appears as a character in the comedy Young Einstein by Yahoo Serious.

Curie's picture was on the Polish inflationary late-1980s 20,000-zloty banknote. Her picture also appeared on the last French 500 franc note (with her husband Pierre Curie), and on stamps and coins.

Element 96 Curium (Cm) was named in her and Pierre's honor.

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References

Madame Curie: A Biography, by Eve Curie, ISBN 0306810387
Marie Curie: A Life, by Susan Quinn, ISBN 0201887940
Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie, by Barbara Goldsmith, ISBN 0393051374

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