Marie Curie

In the summer of 1898, Marie Curie was processing pitchblende in a leaking shed on the rue Vauquelin — dissolving tons of ore in cauldrons of acid, then performing thousands of tedious crystallizations to isolate what she suspected was hiding inside. Her electrometer had already told her the ore was more radioactive than pure uranium could explain. Something else was there — two somethings, as it turned out. That year, she and Pierre announced the discovery of two new elements: polonium, named for her occupied homeland, and radium. After four years of that work, she had accumulated barely enough pure radium to fill a thimble. The discoveries did more than add two entries to the periodic table: their work established that the atom was not inert — laying the foundation for nuclear physics, cancer radiation therapy, and battlefield radiology. She chose not to patent the radium-isolation process, releasing it so the scientific community could work unhindered.

She had arrived in Paris in 1891, at 24, having spent years as a governess in Warsaw to finance her sister Bronisława's medical studies — an arrangement the sisters had agreed on, each funding the other in turn. The University of Warsaw barred women; the Russian government that controlled Congress Poland barred them from university anywhere in its empire.³ At the Sorbonne she finished licenciateships in both physics and mathematics by 1894⁴, and then took a commission to study the magnetic properties of various steels — work that put her in a lab with an instructor named Pierre Curie. They married in 1895. What made their partnership unusual was the structural equality of it: Pierre, already an established physicist, treated Marie's hypothesis about radioactivity as the central problem worth solving, not a junior contribution to be managed. He suspended his own crystallography research to work on her terms.

In 1903, the Nobel committee in Stockholm prepared to award the Physics Prize to Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. Marie's name was not on the nomination.¹ A Swedish mathematician on the committee, Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre, who wrote back that he would not accept the prize unless Marie were included⁵ — her work had originated the research, she had determined radium's atomic weight, and separating them would be, as he put it, a surprise to many. The nomination was amended. In December 1903, all three received the prize; Marie and Pierre split a single share of 70,000 gold francs between them, while Becquerel received a full share alone.⁵ At the ceremony the following year, the president of the Swedish Academy quoted Genesis: "It is not good that man should be alone, I will make a helpmeet for him."⁶ She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.¹

On April 19, 1906, Pierre walked into traffic on the rue Dauphine and was killed instantly by a horse-drawn wagon.² He was 46. Less than a month later, the Sorbonne offered Marie his chair. She took it, becoming the first woman to hold a professorship at a French university.⁴ Hundreds of people — students, photographers, artists — lined up outside on November 5, 1906, for her first lecture.² She gave no outward sign of mourning; she began by summarizing the recent breakthroughs in physics.² Five years later she won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alone this time, for the isolation of radium and the study of its compounds.¹ She remained, and remains, the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.¹

When the First World War began in 1914, Curie gathered France's entire supply of radium, stashed it in a bank vault in Bordeaux, and turned to a different problem: field surgeons were amputating limbs they could have saved because they had no way to locate bullets and shrapnel. She approached wealthy Parisians for vehicles, persuaded French manufacturers to donate X-ray equipment, and by October 1914 had outfitted 20 cars — the petites Curies, soldiers called them.⁷ She also opened a training program at the Radium Institute; by the war's end, 150 women had been trained to operate the equipment.⁸ Her 17-year-old daughter Irène drove and operated alongside her. By November 1918, an estimated one million soldiers had received X-ray exams through her mobile units and the 200 stationary radiological laboratories she established at battlefield hospitals.⁹

Curie died on July 4, 1934, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Haute-Savoie, of aplastic anaemia¹ — likely the cumulative result of decades of unshielded radiation exposure in the shed, the field hospitals, and the laboratory. She was 66. Her 1899–1902 laboratory notebook is still radioactive and will remain so for another 1,500 years.³ In 1914 she founded the Radium Institute in Paris, and in 1932 a second institute in Warsaw; both survive today as the Curie Institute (Paris) and the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Memorial Cancer Centre (Warsaw), each still active in cancer research and treatment.¹⁰¹¹