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Maria Skłodowska-Curie (born Maria Skłodowska; known in other countries as
Marie Curie (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934) was a Polish-French physicist and
chemist. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the first twice-honored
Nobel laureate (and still today the only laureate in two different sciences), and
the first female professor at the Sorbonne.
She was born in Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, the youngest to Polish
parents and lived there until she was 24. In 1891 she went to Paris, France, to
study science. She obtained her higher degrees and conducted nearly all her
scientific work there, and became a naturalized French citizen. She founded the
Curie Institutes in Paris, France, and in her home town, Warsaw. She was the wife
of Pierre Curie.
Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw to parents, both of whom were teachers and
instilled in their children a sense of the value of learning. Maria's early years
were marked by the death of a sister (from typhus) and, four years later, the death
of her mother. In her youth Skłodowska showed an exceptional memory and diligent
work ethic, and was known to neglect food and even sleep to study. At age fifteen
she graduated from high school at the top of her class.
Because she was female, and because of Russian reprisals following the Polish 1863
Uprising against Tsarist Russia, Skłodowska was denied admission to a regular
university. She worked several years as a private tutor while attending Warsaw's
illegal Floating University and helped support her elder sister Bronisława, who was
studying medicine in Paris. Eventually in 1891, having saved up some money earned
working as a governess, Maria went to join her elder sister in Paris.
Skłodowska studied mathematics, physics and chemistry at the Sorbonne. (Later, in
1909, she would become the Sorbonne's first female professor, when she was named to
her late husband's chair in physics, which he had held for only a year and a half
before his tragic death). In early 1893, she graduated first in her undergraduate
class. A year later, also at the Sorbonne, she obtained her master's degree in
mathematics. In 1903, under the supervision of Henri Becquerel, she received her
DSc from ESPCI (École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville
de Paris), becoming the first woman in France to complete a doctorate.
At the Sorbonne, she met and married Pierre Curie, a fellow-instructor. Skłodowska
had begun her scientific career in Paris with an investigation of the magnetic
properties of different kinds of steel; it was their mutual interest in magnetism
that had drawn her and Curie together. Eventually they studied radioactive
materials, particularly pitchblende — the ore from which uranium was extracted —
which had the curious property of being more radioactive than the uranium extracted
from it. By 1898 they had deduced that the pitchblende must contain traces of an
unknown radioactive substance far more radioactive than uranium. On December 26,
1898, Skłodowska-Curie announced the existence of this substance.
Through several years' unceasing work in the most difficult physical conditions,
they processed several tons of pitchblende, progressively concentrating the
radioactive substances and eventually isolating the chloride salts (refining radium
chloride on April 20, 1902) and identifying two previously unknown chemical
elements. The first, they named "polonium," in honor of Skłodowska-Curie's native
country, Poland, then still partitioned among three empires, and the other
"radium," for its intense "radioactivity" — a word coined by Skłodowska-Curie.
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."
Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Eight years later, she
received 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".
In an unusual decision, Skłodowska-Curie intentionally refrained from patenting the
radium-isolation process, leaving it open so that the scientific community could do
research unhindered.
A month after accepting her 1911 Nobel Prize, she was hospitalized with depression
and a kidney ailment.
Skłodowska-Curie was 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). She remains the only woman to have
won two Nobel Prizes, and the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different
science fields. Nevertheless, the French Academy of Sciences refused to abandon its
prejudice against women, and she failed by one vote to be elected to
membership.
After her husband's 1906 death in a street accident, she reputedly had an affair
with physicist Paul Langevin — a married man who had left his wife — which resulted
in a press scandal, taken advantage of by her academic opponents to damage her
credibility. Despite her fame as a scientist working for France, the public's
attitude to the scandal tended toward xenophobia. In a curious coincidence,
Langevin's grandson Michel Langevin later married Skłodowska-Curie's granddaughter,
Hélène Joliot.
During World War I, Skłodowska-Curie pushed for the use of mobile radiography
units, which came to be popularly known as "Little Curies" (petites 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. Skłodowska-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.
After World War I, in 1921 and again in 1929, Skłodowska-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 many resources for her work. Her second American
tour succeeded in equipping the Warsaw Radium Institute, founded in 1925 with her
sister Bronisława as director.
In her later years, Skłodowska-Curie headed the Pasteur Institute and a
radioactivity laboratory created for her by the University of Paris.
Her death near Sallanches, Savoy, in 1934 was from aplastic anemia, almost
certainly due to exposure to radiation, as the damaging effects of hard radiation
were not yet known, and much of her work had been carried out in a shed with no
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
the substances gave off in the dark.
She was interred at the cemetery in Sceaux, where Pierre lay, but sixty years
later, in 1995, in honor of their work, the remains of both were transferred to the
Panthéon in Paris.
The Curies' elder daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in
1935. The younger daughter, Ève Curie, wrote the biography, Madame Curie, after her
mother's death.
 Prizes
Nobel Prize for Physics (1903)
Davy Medal (1903)
Matteucci Medal (1904)
Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1911)
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Marie
Curie - Manifesting Generator - Biography
