Marie Curie
2019
Chemist · Physicist · Nobel Laureate
Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, Poland, she was the youngest of five children born to two well-known teachers. Her father Władysław taught physics and mathematics and later, after a series of financial setbacks, instructed his children on the scientific method and engaged them in private scientific education at home.
After her mother and sister both died from separate illnesses she shed her mother’s Catholic faith and became agnostic.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
Curie and her sister Bronisława made an agreement to support each other financially through their respective educations. Curie spent five years working as a tutor and governess while her sister attended medical school and afterwards finally made her way to the Sorbonne university in Paris.
After graduating with master’s degrees in physics and math, Curie met and married Pierre Curie, a fellow physicist in 1891 in a civil ceremony. They were partners in the laboratory as well as in life and had two daughters.
Curie went on to be the only person in history to win a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines; in Physics in 1903 along with husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for their work on radiation phenomena, and in Chemistry in 1911 for isolating radium. She later discovered a second element, polonium.
Curie is also known for developing a method for delivering X-ray technology to the battlefields of World War I in automobiles that contained mobile radiology units, known as “little Curies”.
Not known at the time of her work, Curie began to suffer from the effects of radiation poisoning. Unaware of the risks, Curie had been in the habit of storing test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket. After nearly 30 years of prolonged exposure, she suffered from many associated chronic illnesses that ultimately lead to her death. Even today, her laboratory notes are considered hazardous to handle and are stored in lead containers.
After her husband tragically died in a street accident, Curie is quoted as saying:
“Pierre belonged to no religion and I did not practice any.”
Curie and her accomplishments have inspired generations of scientists, particularly women. Her own daughter Irene and Irene’s husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1935 for synthesizing new elements. Additionally, one of Marie’s doctoral students became the first woman to be elected to the French Academy in Sciences, a post Marie had been refused due to her gender. She is one of only five women to be interred at the Panthéon, the burial grounds for France’s greatest minds.
“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think can be most useful.”