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The physicist's dedication to science made it difficult for outsiders to understand her, but a century after her second Nobel prize, she gets a second look

Smithsonian Magazine |

When Marie Curie came to the United States for the first time, in May 1921, she had already discovered the elements radium and polonium, coined the term "radio-active" and won the Nobel Prize-twice. But the Polish-born scientist, almost pathologically shy and accustomed to spending most of her time in her Paris laboratory, was stunned by the fanfare that greeted her.

She attended a luncheon on her first day at the house of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie before receptions at the Waldorf Astoria and Carnegie Hall. She would later appear at the American Museum of Natural History, where an exhibit commemorated her discovery of radium. The American Chemical Society, the New York Mineralogical Club, cancer research facilities and the Bureau of Mines held events in her honor. Later that week, 2,000 Smith College students sang Curie's praises in a choral concert before bestowing her with an honorary degree. Dozens more colleges and universities, including Yale, Wellesley and the University of Chicago, conferred honors on her.

The marquee event of her six-week U.S. tour was held in the East Room of the White House. President Warren Harding spoke at length, praising her "great attainments in the realms of science and intellect" and saying she represented the best in womanhood. "We lay at your feet the testimony of that love which all the generations of men have been wont to bestow upon the noble woman, the unselfish wife, the devoted mother."

It was a rather odd thing to say to the most decorated scientist of that era, but then again Marie Curie was never easy to understand or categorize. That was because she was a pioneer, an outlier, unique for the newness and immensity of her achievements. But it was also because of her sex. Curie worked during a great age of innovation, but proper women of her time were thought to be too sentimental to perform objective science. She would forever be considered a bit strange, not just a great scientist but a great woman scientist. You would not expect the president of the United States to praise one of Curie's male contemporaries by calling attention to his manhood and his devotion as a father. Professional science until fairly recently was a man's world, and in Curie's time it was rare for a woman even to participate in academic physics, never mind triumph over it.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of her second Nobel Prize, the first time anyone had achieved such a feat. In her honor, the United Nations named 2011 the International Year of Chemistry. Curie has always been a fascinating character, the subject of books and plays and movies, and this anniversary has prompted several new works about her. October is Nobel Prize season, so it's a good time to examine the story of her story-how she lived, but also how she has been mythologized and misunderstood.

Curie was born Manya Sklodowska in November 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, and raised there during a Russian occupation. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Marie was 10 years old. A prodigy in both literature and math, as a teenager Marie attended a secret school called the "Floating University"-its locale changed regularly to avoid detection by the Russians-which taught physics and natural history as well as the forbidden subjects of Polish history and culture. Her father, a science teacher, encouraged his daughter's curiosity but could not afford to send her to college. Marie worked as a governess until, at 24, she had saved enough money and purchased a train ticket to Paris, where she gravitated to the Latin Quarter and enrolled at the Sorbonne.

She immersed herself in French and math and made ends meet cleaning glassware in university labs. She rationed her intake of food until, on more than one occasion, she collapsed of weakness. Science thrilled her, and she earned a degree in physics in 1893 and another in mathematics the following year.

In 1894, she met Pierre Curie, a 35-year-old physicist at a French technical college who had been studying crystals and magnetism. More than a decade before, he and his brother Jacques had discovered piezoelectricity, the electric charge produced in solid materials under pressure. Pierre was taken by Marie's uncommon intellect and drive, and he proposed to her. "It would...be a beautiful thing," he wrote, "to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science."

They were married in 1895 in a civil service attended by family and a few friends. For the occasion, Marie donned a blue cotton dress, one practical enough to wear in the laboratory after the ceremony. From then on, she and Pierre followed what they called an "anti-natural" path that included a "renunciation of the pleasures of life." They lived plainly in their apartment on the rue de la Glacière within walking distance of their experiments. Pierre earned a modest 6,000 francs per year, about $30,000 today, while Marie worked gratis in his laboratory and prepared for an exam that would certify her to teach girls.

The Curies' first daughter, Irène, was born in 1897. A difficult pregnancy had forced Marie to spend less time in the lab just as she was gathering data for a doctoral thesis. When her mother-in-law died weeks after Irène's birth, her father-in-law, Eugene, a retired physician, stepped in, becoming the hands-on parent that others expected Marie to be.

By the time her second daughter, Eve, was born in 1904, Marie had grown accustomed to the disdain of colleagues who thought she spent too much time in the lab and not enough in the nursery. Georges Sagnac, a friend and collaborator, eventually confronted her. "Don't you love Irène?" he asked. "It seems to me that I wouldn't prefer the idea of reading a paper by [Ernest] Rutherford, to getting what my body needs and looking after such an agreeable little girl."

But read scientific publications she did. In labs across Europe, scientists were studying new and surprising phenomena. In 1895 Wilhelm Röntgen had discovered X-rays, and the mathematician Henri Poincaré sought to understand the luminescent rays that could pass through a hand and impress a ghostly image on photographic paper. Henri Becquerel was noting the emission of a different kind of mysterious rays, those from uranium salts. J. J. Thomson discovered negatively charged particles, which we now know as electrons (and which we now know are the source of X-rays).

Curie built on Becquerel's observations of the element uranium. At first, she and other scientists were baffled about the source of the high-energy emissions. "The uranium shows no appreciable change of state, no visible chemical transformation, it remains, in appearance at least, the same as ever, the source of the energy it discharges remains undetectable," she wrote in 1900. She wondered whether the emitted rays were violating a basic law of thermodynamics: the conservation of energy.

Finally, she posited a daring hypothesis: The rays emitted might be a basic property of uranium atoms, which we now know to be subatomic particles released as the atoms decay. Her theory had radical implications. Trish Baisden, a senior chemist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, describes it as a shocking proposal: "It was truly amazing and a bold statement at the time because the atom was thought to be the most elementary particle, one that could not be divided. It further meant that atoms are not necessarily stable." Curie's hypothesis would revise the scientific understanding of matter at its most elemental level.

Curie set out to measure the intensity of uranium's rays by adapting the electrometer Pierre had invented with his brother. The device allowed her to measure extremely low electrical currents in air near mineral samples that contained uranium. She soon repeated the experiment with thorium, which behaved in similar ways.

But she was puzzled by data that showed that the intensity of the radiation emitted by uranium and thorium was greater than expected based on the amounts of the elements she knew to be in her samples. "There must be, I thought, some unknown substance, very active, in these minerals," she concluded. "My husband agreed with me and I urged that we search at once for this hypothetical substance, thinking that, with joined efforts, a result would be quickly obtained."

In 1898 she indeed identified one of the substances and named it polonium, after her homeland. Five months later, she identified a second element, which the world came to know as radium. Curie described the elements she studied as "radio-active."

Pierre put his crystals aside to help his wife isolate these radioactive elements and study their properties. Marie extracted pure radium salts from pitchblende, a highly radioactive ore obtained from mines in Bohemia. The extraction required tons of the substance, which she dissolved in cauldrons of acid before obtaining barium sulphate and other alkalines, which she then purified and converted into chlorides. The separation of radium from the alkalines required thousands of tedious crystallizations. But as she wrote to her brother in 1894, "one never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." After four years, Curie had accumulated barely enough pure radium to fill a thimble.

Working in a dilapidated shed with broken windows and poor ventilation, she nonetheless was able to make sensitive measurements. It is remarkable, says Baisden, that Curie calculated the atomic weight of radium so accurately given such deplorable conditions. "Large swings in temperature and humidity undoubtedly affected the electrometer...but Marie's patience and tenacity prevailed."

Both Curies were plagued by ailments-burns and fatigue-that, in retrospect, were clearly caused by repeated exposures to high doses of radiation. Both, too, were resistant to the suggestion that their research materials caused their ailments.

In 1903, Curie became the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics. Professors who reviewed her doctoral thesis, which was about radiation, declared that it was the greatest single contribution to science ever written.

Rumors of a Nobel Prize began to circulate, but some members of the French Academy of Sciences attributed the brilliance of the work not to Marie, but to her co-workers. These skeptics began to lobby quietly for the prize to be split between Becquerel and Pierre. But Pierre insisted to influential people on the Nobel committee that Marie had originated their research, conceived experiments and generated theories about the nature of radioactivity.

Both Curies shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Becquerel in 1903. It was the first Nobel to be awarded to a woman.

At the awards ceremony, the president of the Swedish Academy, which administered the prize, quoted the Bible in his remarks about the Curies' research: "It is not good that man should be alone, I will make a helpmeet for him."

Whether Marie Curie took the remark as an insult is not known-it surely rankles today-but it must be among the most grudging comments ever said to a laureate. Moreover, the notion that Marie was a mere helpmeet to Pierre-one of the more persistent myths about her-was an opinion widely held, judging from published and unpublished comments by other scientists and observers.

"Errors are notoriously hard to kill," observed her friend, the British physicist Hertha Ayrton, "but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat."

At the Sorbonne, it was Pierre who got the plum job, a full professorship. Marie was not promoted. Pierre hired more assistants and made Marie the official head of the laboratory, freeing her to conduct experiments and for the first time, be paid for it.

The most successful collaboration between a husband and wife in the history of science ended suddenly on April 19, 1906, when Pierre, apparently lost in thought, walked into traffic on the rue Dauphine and was killed instantly by an onrushing carriage.

Instead of accepting a widow's pension, Marie took over Pierre's position at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to teach there. Hundreds of people-students, artists, photographers, celebrities-lined up outside the university on November 5, 1906, hoping to attend her first lecture. She gave no outward sign of mourning. She began by summarizing the recent breakthroughs in physics research. "When one considers the progress of physics in the last decade," she said, "one is surprised by the changes it has produced in our ideas about electricity and about matter."

She wrote a diary during this time, addressed to her late husband, about continuing their research. "I am working in the laboratory all day long, it is all I can do: I am better off there than anywhere else," she wrote. In 1910, she published a 971-page treatise on radioactivity. Some men in the scientific establishment still didn't consider her an equal, however; she applied for membership in the French Academy of Sciences in 1910, and although Pierre had been a member, she was denied by two votes. One Academy member, the physicist Emile Amagat, claimed that "women cannot be part of the Institute of France."

In 1911, rumors spread that Curie was having an affair with the prominent physicist Paul Langevin, a man five years her junior who had been Pierre's student and had worked closely with Albert Einstein. Langevin's estranged wife discovered apparent love letters from Curie to her husband and gave them to a tabloid newspaper. It and other publications ran stories with headlines such as "A Romance in a Laboratory." Although a widower under similar circumstances would likely not have suffered any consequences, Curie found her reputation tarnished. Neither Curie nor Langevin discussed their relationship with outsiders. "I believe there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life," she wrote to a critic.

The front-page coverage of the scandal threatened to overshadow another news story later that year: her second Nobel Prize.

This one, in chemistry, was for the discovery of polonium and radium. In her acceptance speech in Stockholm, she paid tribute to her husband but also made clear that her work was independent from his, spelling out their separate contributions and describing the discoveries she had made after his death.

At the end of 1911, Curie became very ill. She had an operation to remove lesions from her uterus and kidney, followed by a long recovery. In 1913, she began to travel again and return to science. In March of that year, Einstein paid her an extended visit, and later she opened and headed a new research facility in Warsaw. As she was setting up a second institute, in Paris, World War I broke out. She outfitted 18 portable X-ray stations that could treat wounded soldiers on the front lines. She sometimes operated and repaired the machines herself, and established 200 more permanent X-ray posts during the war.

Eve became a journalist and wrote the definitive biography, Madame Curie, published in 1937. Irène studied at her mother's institute in Paris and married her mother's assistant, the charismatic physicist Frédéric Joliot, with whom she bore two children. Irène maintained a strong presence in the lab, and in 1935, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie were awarded a Nobel Prize for synthesizing new radioactive elements. It was another record: the first time both a parent and child had separately won the Nobel Prize.

After Marie Curie's second Nobel Prize and her subsequent research, she was rarely dismissed as a helpmeet. And once the tabloids moved on from the Langevin scandal, her image as a homewrecker faded. But there were deliberate efforts to shape her story. A case in point was Curie's first trip to America, in 1921.

The tour was largely the work of a New York City journalist named Missy Meloney, who had interviewed Curie in 1920 in Paris for the women's magazine the Delineator, which Meloney edited. Meloney learned that the Curies had never patented the process for purifying radium. As a result, other scientists and U.S. chemical companies were processing radium, then selling it for cancer treatments and military research for $100,000 per gram. Curie was now unable to afford the element she had discovered. Sensing a human-interest story, Meloney created the Marie Curie Radium Fund to raise money to purchase radium for Curie's continuing research.

American women would be inspired to give to Curie, Meloney figured, only if her image as a scientist-which stereotypically suggested someone dispassionate, even severe-could be softened. So Meloney's articles presented Curie as a benevolent healer, intent on using radium to treat cancer. Meloney also persuaded editor friends at other newspapers and magazines to emphasize the same image. Curie understood that radium might be useful in the clinic, but she had no direct role in using it for medical treatments. Nevertheless, Curie's motivation for discovering radium, according to a headline in the Delineator, was "That Millions Shall Not Die." Writers described her as the "Jeanne D'Arc of the laboratory," with a face of "suffering and patience."

Curie disapproved of the publicity campaign. In lectures, she reminded her audience that her discovery of radium was the work "of pure science...done for itself" rather than with "direct usefulness" in mind.

And yet Meloney's efforts succeeded: She raised more than $100,000 on Curie's behalf within months, enough to buy a gram of radium for the Curie Institute in Paris. Meloney invited Curie to the United States.

Curie, who disliked travel and attention, agreed to come to thank Meloney and those who had contributed to the cause. But, she wrote Meloney, "you know how careful I am to avoid all publicity referring to my name. And how I should be very grateful to arrange for my voyage with the minimum of publicity."

Curie sailed with Irène, 23, and Eve, 16, and within hours of disembarking in New York embarked on a whirlwind tour that took her as far west as the Grand Canyon. As it wore on, Curie became exhausted and asked to cancel events, or at least not have to speak at them. She appeared aloof and sometimes refused to shake hands with admirers. She did not appear to be the kindly maternal figure that Meloney had made her out to be. Clearly, Curie's strength and patience were wearing thin.

She carried the gram of radium home to Paris in a vial handed to her by President Harding at the White House. She worked in her laboratory until her death.

When Curie died, at age 66 in 1934, journalists echoed the image popularized by Meloney. The New York Times called her a "martyr to science" who "contributed more to the general welfare of mankind" as a "modest, self-effacing woman." The physicist Robert Millikan, president of the California Institute of Technology, issued a public statement: "In spite of her continuous absorption in her scientific work, she has devoted much time to the cause of peace....She embodied in her person all the simpler, homelier and yet most perfect virtues of womanhood."

In the years after her death, scientists, historians, artists and others have grappled with her story, often highlighting qualities or imputing traits to her that reflected contemporary social values more than biographical truths. Curie's portrayal in books and movies tended to emphasize her roles as wife, mother and humanitarian at the expense of her importance as a brilliant physicist. Most memorably, MGM's Madame Curie (1943) featured Greer Garson as a devoted wife rather than a sometimes prickly, independent scientist.

With the women's movement of the 1960s and '70s, Curie's reputation as a remarkable scientist came to the fore. The physicist Rosalyn Yalow, in an essay she wrote at the time of winning her own Nobel Prize in 1977 for research involving radioactive compounds, said that Curie was her inspiration. Biographers attempted to depict the brilliance and complexity of this outsize character. A new play, Radiance, written by the actor and director Alan Alda, focuses on her relationships with Pierre and Langevin as well as her science. A new graphic novel, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallou t by Lauren Redniss, examines Curie's life in the context of radioactivity's impact on history. It has a glow-in-the-dark cover.

It's taken a century, but we can finally appreciate her as a multifaceted woman of uncommon intensity, intelligence and will-a woman of courage, conviction and yes, contradictions. After a century we see her not as a caricature, but as one of the 20th century's most important scientists, who was, at the same time, unmistakably, reassuringly human.

Julie Des Jardins, of Baruch College, wrote The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science.

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Smithsonian Magazine | When Marie Curie came to the United States for the first time, in May 1921, she had already discovered the elements radium and polonium, coined the term "radio-active" and won the Nobel Prize-twice. But the Polish-born scientist, almost pathologically shy and accustomed to spending most of her time in her Paris laboratory, was stunned by the fanfare that greeted her.

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Humble beginnings

Born Maria Skłodowska on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, she was the youngest of five children of poor school teachers.

After her mother died and her father could no longer support her she became a governess, reading and studying in her own time to quench her thirst for knowledge. She never lost this passion.

To become a teacher - the only alternative which would allow her to be independent - was never a possibility because a lack of money prevented her from a formal higher education. However, when her sister offered her lodgings in Paris with a view to going to university, she grasped the opportunity and moved to France in 1891.

She immediately entered Sorbonne University in Paris where she read physics and mathematics - she had naturally discovered a love of the subjects through her insatiable appetite for learning.

It was in Paris, in 1894, that she met Pierre Curie - a scientist working in the city - and who she married a year later. It was also around this time that she adopted the French spelling of her name - Marie. It is of course this version of her name that our charity uses, along with our hospices, Marie Curie Nursing Service and our Companion service.

Work on radioactivity and discoveries

The Curies became research workers at the School of Chemistry and Physics in Paris and there they began their pioneering work into invisible rays given off by uranium - a new phenomenon which had recently been discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel.

He had shown that the rays were able to pass through solid matter, fog and photographic film and caused air to conduct electricity.

Marie also noticed that samples of a mineral called pitchblende, which contains uranium ore, were a great deal more radioactive than the pure element uranium. Further work convinced her the very large readings she was getting could not be caused by uranium alone - there was something else in the pitchblende. Since nobody had ever found it before, it could only be present in tiny quantities, and it seemed to be very radioactive. Marie was convinced she had found a new chemical element - other scientists doubted her results.

Pierre and Marie Curie set about working to search for the unknown element. They ground up samples of pitchblende, dissolved them in acid, and began to separate the different elements present, using the standard analytical chemistry techniques of the time. Eventually, they extracted a black powder 330 times more radioactive than uranium, which they called polonium . Polonium was a new chemical element, atomic number 84.

When the Curies investigated further, they found that the liquid left behind after they had extracted polonium was still extremely radioactive. They realised that pitchblende contained another new element, far more radioactive than polonium, but present in even smaller quantities.

In 1898, the Curies published strong evidence supporting the existence of the new element - which they called radium - but they still had no sample of it. Pitchblende is an expensive mineral, because it contains valuable uranium, and Marie needed a lot of it.

She got in touch with a factory in Austria that removed the uranium from pitchblende for industrial use and bought several tonnes of the worthless waste product, which was even more radioactive than the original pitchblende, and was much cheaper. Marie set about processing the pitchblende to extract the tiny quantities of radium. This involved working on a much larger scale than before, with 20kg batches of the mineral - grinding, dissolving, filtering, precipitating, collecting, redissolving, crystallising and recrystallising.

The work was heavy and physically demanding - and involved dangers the Curies did not appreciate. During this time they began to feel sick and physically exhausted; today we can attribute their ill-health to the early symptoms of radiation sickness. At the time they persevered in ignorance of the risks, often with raw and inflamed hands because they were continually handling highly radioactive material.

In 1902 Marie eventually isolated radium (as radium chloride), determining its atomic weight as 225.93. The journey to the discovery had been long and arduous.
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In 1903 Marie and Pierre were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with Henri Becquerel for their combined, though separate, work on radioactivity.

In the same year, Marie passed her doctorate thesis in Physics.

In 1906 Marie's life was struck by tragedy when Pierre was killed in a street accident after being knocked down by a horse and cart. Her indomitable spirit, however, kept her working and she went on to succeed him in his Chair as Professor at the Sorbonne, as well as carrying on lecturing where he had left off.

Her determination and remarkable endeavours led to a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in chemistry for creating a means of measuring radioactivity. Not long after, Sorbonne built the first radium institute with two laboratories; one for study of radioactivity under Marie Curie's direction, and the other for biological research into the treatment of cancer.

During the First World War, Marie Curie worked to develop small, mobile X-ray units that could be used to diagnose injuries near the battlefront. As Director of the Red Cross Radiological Service, she toured Paris, asking for money, supplies and vehicles which could be converted.

In October 1914, the first machines, known as "Petits Curies", were ready, and Marie set off to the front. She worked with her daughter Irene, then aged 17, at casualty clearing stations close to the front line, X-raying wounded men to locate fractures, bullets and shrapnel.

The technology Marie Curie developed for the "Petits Curies" is similar to that used today in the fluoroscopy machine at our Hampstead hospice. A powerful X-ray machine, it allows doctors to examine moving images in the body, such as pumping action of the heart or the motion of swallowing.

After the war, Marie continued her work as a researcher, teacher and head of a laboratory and received many awards and prizes. Among them were the Ellan Richards Research Prize (1921), the Grand Prix du Marquis d'Argenteuil (1923) and the Cameron Prize from Edinburgh University (1931). She was also the recipient of many honorary degrees from universities around the world.
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Why we're named after Marie Curie

A successful name in the field of science, Marie Curie allowed her name to be used by the Marie Curie Hospital in north London. Opened in 1930, it was staffed entirely by women to treat female cancer patients using radiology. It also had research facilities.

After the Marie Curie Hospital was more or less destroyed in 1944 by a bomb, a group of people decided to re-establish the hospital as a charity under Marie Curie's name, rather than as part of the new NHS. This marked the start of the hospital's development into a charity to support cancer patients.

Now, in the 21 st century, Marie Curie is the UK's leading end of life charity in the UK. We're here to support anyone with an illness they're likely to die from, and those close to them. We provide expert hospice care, support over the phone, and push for a better end of life for all by campaigning and sharing research to change the system. In 2015, Marie Curie's granddaughter, Hélène Langevin-Joliot, visited our Hampstead hospice and talked about her grandmother's legacy.

We are proud to have this great scientist as our namesake.
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Films about Marie Curie the scientist

Marie Curie's renown has led to her being the subject of numerous films over the years.

Below are just some of the many dramatisations that have been created about her work and life. Our charity has not been involved in the production of any of any of these works.

Radioactive - 2020

British actress Rosamund Pike portrays Marie Curie in Radioactive , the most recent film about the physicist. It focuses on her career in the scientific world and the relationships she had throughout her life, including with her husband Pierre Curie.

Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge - 2016

Although born in Poland, Marie Curie spent much of her life living in France. As a result, she has been portrayed several times in French cinema. Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge , a French-language film, was screened in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.

Marie Curie: More Than Meets the Eye - 1997

In this 1997 TV film Marie Curie is played by Kate Trotter. Marie Curie: More Than Meets the Eye sees two little girls notice a woman who is somehow able to enter high-security buildings during WW1. They later find out that the subject of their intrigue is none other than the famous physicist.

Madame Curie - 1943

This biographical film was released only 10 years after Marie Curie's death - a testament to the enduring recognition of her work. Madame Curie was adapted from the biography of Ève Curie, Marie Curie's daughter, and focuses on how her mother and father met while working together.
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Marie Curie quotes
"Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained." "Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood." "I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries." "I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale." "One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." "Have no fear of perfection; you'll never reach it." "Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit." "You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his 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 we can be most useful." "I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy." "Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas."

Death and legacy

On 4 July 1934, at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, France at the age of 66, Marie Curie died. The cause of her death was given as aplastic pernicious anaemia, a condition she developed after years of exposure to radiation through her work.

She left two daughters, Irene (born 1898) and Eve (born 1904).

Irene, like her mother, entered the field of scientific research and, with her husband Frederic Joliot, worked on the nucleus of the atom and together were awarded a Nobel Prize and credited with the discovery of artificial radiation. Irene too died of a radiation-related illness - leukaemia - in 1956. Irene's daughter and granddaugther to Marie Curie, Hélène Langevin-Joliot, herself a famous nuclear physicist, visited our Hampstead hospice in March 2015.

Eve became a journalist and writer. Irene's daughter Dr Hélène Langevin-Joliot (born 1927) also pursued a career in nuclear physics and became research emeritus of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris.

In 1995, Marie and Pierre Curie were reburied in the Pantheon - the Paris mausoleum reserved for France's most revered dead - on the orders of French President Mitterand.

Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a place in the Pantheon for her own achievements.

Marie Curie's life as a scientist was one which flourished because of her ability to observe, deduce and predict. She is also arguably the first woman to make such a significant contribution to science. Marie Curie the charity is proud to be named in honour of her.

Further information about Marie Curie
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Learn about Marie Curie's history, from our founding in 1948 to today.

Our history

How we fund, manage and invest in research.

Research strategy

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Marie Curie the scientist | Biog, facts & quotes

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Marie Curie is remembered for her discovery of radium and polonium, and her huge contribution to the fight against cancer. This work continues to inspire our charity's mission to support anyone with an illness they're likely to die from, and those close to them.

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Nobelprize.org, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize

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“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.”

"Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas."

"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done."

"There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth."

"I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries."

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Marie continued to do research in radioactivity. When World War I broke out in 1914, she paused her studies and organized a fleet of portable X-ray machines for doctors on the front.

After the war, she worked hard to raise money for her Radium Institute, including a trip to the U.S. But by 1920, she was suffering from medical problems, likely due to her exposure to radioactive materials. On July 4, 1934, she died of aplastic anemia, a blood disease that is often caused by too much exposure to radiation.

Maries was buried next to Pierre, but in 1995, their remains were moved and interred in the Pantheon in Paris alongside France's greatest citizens.

The Curies received another honor in 1944 with the discovery of the 96th element on the Periodic Table of Elements, which was named curium.

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Marie next decided to test all of the known chemical ores to see if any others would emit Becquerel rays. In 1898, she brainstormed the term “radioactive” to describe materials that had this effect. Pierre was very interested in her research so he put his own work aside to work with her. Together, they found that two ores, chalcolite and pitchblende, were much more radioactive than pure uranium. Marie suspected that these ores might contain undiscovered radioactive elements.

Several tons of pitchblende were donated by the Austrian government, but the space Marie was as a lab was too small. So they moved their research to an old shed outside of the school. Processing the ore was exhausting work. New protocols for separating the pitchblende into its chemical components had to be devised. Marie often worked late at night stirring huge cauldrons with an iron rod nearly as tall as her.

Little by little, various components of the ore were tested. The Curies found that two of the chemical components, one containing mostly bismuth and another containing mostly barium, were strongly radioactive. In July 1898, the Curies published their conclusion: the bismuth compound contained a previously undiscovered radioactive element that they named polonium, after Marie's native country, Poland. By the end of that year they had isolated a second radioactive element they called radium, from radius, the Latin word for rays. In 1902, they announced success in extracting purified radium.

In June 1903, Marie was the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate in physics. In November of that year the Curies, together with Henri Becquerel, were named winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for their contributions to the understanding of atomic structure. The nominating committee objected to including a woman as a Nobel Laureate, but Pierre insisted that the original research was Marie’s. In 1911, after Pierre’s death, Marie was awarded a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium

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One of Marie’s professors gave Marie a research grant for her to study the magnetic properties and chemical composition of steel. When arranging for lab space, she was introduced to a man named Pierre Curie. Pierre was an intelligent researcher and had invented several instruments for measuring magnetic fields and electricity. He got her a small place at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry where he worked. The two were married in the summer of 1895.

Marie had been interested by the reports of Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays and by Henri Becquerel’s report of similar “rays” emitted from uranium ores. She decided to use Pierre’s instruments to measure the faint electrical currents she detected in air that had been bombarded with uranium rays. Her studies showed that the effects of the rays were constant even when the uranium ore was treated in different ways. She confirmed Becquerel’s observation that greater amounts of uranium in an ore resulted in more intense rays. Then she stated a revolutionary hypothesis; Marie believed that the emission of these rays was an atomic property of uranium. If true, this would mean that the accepted view of the atom as the smallest possible fragment of matter was false.

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Maria Salomea Sklodowska-Marie Curie- was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland. She was the youngest of 5 with 3 sisters and 1 brother. Both of her parents were educators who believed women should have an education just like men. At age 15, Maria graduated High school in top of her class. None of the colleges would except women so Maria and her sister Bronia left the country. When Maria was 17 she became a governess to help Bronia go to medical school in Paris while Maria studied on her own, waiting to join Bronia in getting a degree. When Registering for College Maria changed her name to Marie to sound more French. Though Marie was very smart, High school had not prepared her for college at Sorbonne. She lived in an apartment very close to college so she could get more study time and saved money by only drinking tea and eating bread.
Although she struggled at first, Marie graduated, top of her class and got a masters in physics in July 1893. The Woman's Education Advocates gave her a scholarship to get a degree in mathematics which she received in 1894.

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Name:
Marie Curie

Occupation:
Physicist

Birth Date:
Nov. 7, 1867

Death Date:
July 4, 1934

Education:
Sorbonne

Place of Birth:
Warsaw, Poland

Place of Death:
Passy, France

Originally:
Maria Sklodowska

AKA:
-Madame Pierre Curie

-Madame Maria Curie

-Madame Curie-Skłodowska

Full Name:
Maria Salomea Slodowska- Curie

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Marie Curie was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, Poland. Marie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win the award in two different fields -physics and chemistry. Her and her husband's (Pierre Curie) efforts led to the discovery of polonium & radium, and after Pierre's death, the further development of x-rays. Marie Died on July 4, 1934