Marie Curie in her laboratory in Paris, 1912 
Marie Skłodowska Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.
She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.
Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work.
She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist Henri Becquerel. Curie and her husband declined to go to Stockholm to receive the prize in person; they were too busy with their work, and Pierre Curie, who disliked public ceremonies...
... was feeling increasingly ill. As Nobel laureates were required to deliver a lecture, the Curies finally undertook the trip in 1905. The award money allowed the Curies to hire their first laboratory assistant.
In December 1904, Curie gave birth to their second daughter, Ève. She hired Polish governesses to teach her daughters her native language, and sent or took them on visits to Poland.
On 19 April 1906, Pierre Curie was killed in a road accident. Walking across the Rue Dauphine in heavy rain, he was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle and fell under its wheels, causing his skull to fracture. Marie Curie was devastated by her husband's death.
On 13 May 1906 the physics department of the University of Paris decided to retain the chair that had been created for her late husband and to offer it to Marie. She accepted it, hoping to create a world-class laboratory as a tribute to her husband Pierre.
In her later years, she headed the Radium Institute (Institut du radium, now Curie Institute, Institut Curie), a radioactivity laboratory created for her by the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris.
In 1910, Curie succeeded in isolating radium; she also defined an international standard for radioactive emissions that was eventually named for her and Pierre: the curie.
Nevertheless, in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences did not elect her to be a member by one or two votes. Elected instead was Édouard Branly, an inventor who had helped Guglielmo Marconi develop the wireless telegraph.
A doctoral student of Curie, Marguerite Perey, became the first woman elected to membership in the Academy – over half a century later, in 1962.
During the French Academy of Sciences elections, she was vilified by the right-wing press who criticised her for being a foreigner and an atheist. Her daughter later remarked on the public hypocrisy...
... as the French press often portrayed Curie as an unworthy foreigner when she was nominated for a French honor, but would portray her as a French hero when she received a foreign one such as her Nobel Prizes.
International recognition for her work had been growing to new heights, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored her a second time, with the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
This award was "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."
(She named the first chemical element that she discovered in 1898, polonium, after her native country)
Curie's second Nobel Prize enabled her to persuade the French government into supporting the Radium Institute, built in 1914, where research was conducted in chemistry, physics, and medicine.
A month after accepting her 1911 Nobel Prize, she was hospitalized with depression and a kidney ailment. For most of 1912, she avoided public life but did spend time in England with her friend and fellow physicist, Hertha Ayrton.
She returned to her laboratory only in December, after a break of about 14 months.
During World War I, Curie recognized that wounded soldiers were best served if operated upon as soon as possible. She saw a need for field radiological centers near the front lines to assist battlefield surgeons.
After a quick study of radiology, anatomy, and automotive mechanics she procured X-ray equipment, vehicles, auxiliary generators, and developed mobile radiography units, which came to be popularly known as petites Curies ("Little Curies").
Photo: Curie in a mobile X-ray vehicle.
Photo: Curie in a mobile X-ray vehicle.
She became the director of the Red Cross Radiology Service and set up France's first military radiology center, operational by late 1914.
Assisted at first by a military doctor and by her 17-year-old daughter Irène, Curie directed the installation of 20 mobile radiological vehicles and another 200 radiological units at field hospitals in the first year of the war.
In 1915, Curie produced hollow needles containing "radium emanation", a colorless, radioactive gas given off by radium, later identified as radon, to be used for sterilizing infected tissue. She provided the radium from her own one-gram supply.
It is estimated that over a million wounded soldiers were treated with her X-ray units. Busy with this work, she carried out very little scientific research during that period.
In spite of all her humanitarian contributions to the French war effort, Curie never received any formal recognition of it from the French government.
Also, promptly after the war started, she attempted to donate her gold Nobel Prize medals to the war effort but the French National Bank refused to accept them.
She did buy war bonds, using her Nobel Prize money. She said:
She did buy war bonds, using her Nobel Prize money. She said:
"I am going to give up the little gold I possess. I shall add to this the scientific medals, which are quite useless to me. There is something else: by sheer laziness, I had allowed the money for my second Nobel Prize to remain in Stockholm in Swedish crowns."
"This is the chief part of what we possess. I should like to bring it back here and invest it in war loans. The state needs it. Only, I have no illusions: this money will probably be lost."
After the war, she summarized her wartime experiences in a book, Radiology in War (1919).
Curie visited Poland for the last time in early 1934. A few months later, on 4 July 1934, she died at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, Haute-Savoie, from aplastic anemia believed to have been contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation.
The damaging effects of ionising radiation were not known at the time of her work, which had been carried out without the safety measures later developed.
She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket, and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the faint light that the substances gave off in the dark.
Curie was also exposed to X-rays from unshielded equipment while serving as a radiologist in field hospitals during the war. Her many decades of exposure to radiation caused chronic illnesses and ultimately her death. She never acknowledged the health risks of radiation exposure.
Because of their levels of radioactive contamination, her papers from the 1890s are considered too dangerous to handle. Even her cookbook is highly radioactive. Her papers are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing.
She was interred at the cemetery in Sceaux, alongside her husband Pierre. Sixty years later, in 1995, in honor of their achievements, the remains of both were transferred to the Panthéon, Paris.
Marie Curie's remains are still dangerously radioactive.
Ève, Marie and Irene Curie in 1908.
