Biography of Marie Curie

Maria Skłodowska's birthplace on ulica Freta (Freta Street) in Warsaw's "New Town."


Dołęga coat-of-arms, hereditary in Skłodowska's family
Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw to Bronisława and Władysław Skłodowski, impoverished teachers who could barely make ends meet[2] but who instilled in their children a sense of the value of learning. The father, Władysław, taught mathematics and physics, subjects that his daughter was to pursue. On both the paternal and maternal sides, the family had lost their property and fortunes through patriotic involvements in Polish national uprisings. This condemned each subsequent generation, including that of Maria and her elder sisters and brother, to a difficult struggle to get ahead in life.[3]
Maria was the youngest of five children: Zofia (born 1862), Józef (1863), Bronisława (1865), Helena (1866) and finally Maria (1867).
Maria's early years were marked by the death of her sister Zofia from typhus and, two years later, the death of her courageous, hard-working mother from tuberculosis. These events caused Maria to give up her Roman Catholic religion and become agnostic.[4]
From childhood Skłodowska showed a phenomenal memory and capacity for concentration, an exceptionally quick mind, and extraordinary diligence; she was known to neglect food and sleep in order to study. She also showed a certain predisposition to depressions, which would recur later in life.[5] At age sixteen she graduated at the top of her class from a Russian liceum, winning a gold medal.
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.[citation needed] Her father having lost his savings through bad investments, Maria had to take work as a teacher while attending Warsaw's illegal Polish Flying University.
At age 18 she took a post in Ciechanów as a governess to a wealthy landed family, the Żórawskis. During her nearly four years there, far from home, Maria experienced isolation, life among strangers, abasement as a governess, and finally her first, joyous but also painful, love, which left her with a deep sense of humiliation. Her pupil Kazimierz Żórawski, after going to Warsaw to study, realized the attraction that he had felt to his tutor, who radiated intelligence and a vivacious girlish charm. But his parents disapproved of any plans that he might have harbored of marrying the penniless girl, and Kazimierz wanted no conflict with his parents.[6]


Krakowskie Przedmieście 66, near Warsaw's Old Town (in the distance). At a lab here, in 1890–91, Maria Skłodowska did her first scientific work.


Plaque commemorating Skłodowska's first scientific work, in a physics laboratory directed by J.J. Boguski, at Warsaw's Museum of Industry and Agriculture
Maria returned to Warsaw, pursued her education, worked in a laboratory on historic Krakowskie Przedmieście, and dreamed of going to Paris, France, where her sister Bronisława was finishing her medical studies, financed partly with Maria's savings. Maria continued her long-distance romance with Kazimierz, who eventually went to Zakopane, where Maria was visiting, to be alone with her again. Mania, though smitten with him, stuck by her guns, rejecting all proposals short of marriage.[7]
Their subsequent breakup proved tragic for both. Kazimierz Żórawski soon earned his doctorate and pursued an academic career as a mathematician, becoming a professor and rector of Kraków University and president of the Warsaw Society of Learning. He of course followed Maria's stunning scientific career. Anecdotes would describe him, in old age, often sitting beneath her monument on Warsaw's Wawel Street (ulica Wawelska) before the Radium Institute that had been founded by double Nobel laureate Maria Skłodowska–Curie ("Madame Curie").[8]
Maria Skłodowska in 1891, after the breakup, went back to her old idea of studying in Paris, where her sister had completed medical school and gotten married. Maria found shelter with her sister and was soon one of only twenty-odd women among two thousand students of the exact sciences at the Sorbonne (the University of Paris). Though at first behind her classmates in some areas, she soon caught up.[9]
At the Sorbonne, Skłodowska studied mathematics, physics and chemistry. (Later, in 1909, she would become that University'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.
It was then that Pierre Curie entered her life. He was an instructor in the School of Physics and Chemistry, the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI). Skłodowska had begun her scientific career in Paris with an investigation of the magnetic properties of various steels; it was their mutual interest in magnetism that drew Skłodowska and Curie together.[10] He soon realized that in Skłodowska he had met a genius.[11]
Her departure for the summer to Warsaw only enhanced their mutual feelings for each other. She was still laboring under the illusion that she would be able to return to Poland and work in her chosen field of study. When, however, she was denied a place at Kraków University merely because she was a woman, she returned to Paris. Not fully a year later, in 1895, she and Pierre Curie married, and thereafter the two physicists hardly ever left their laboratory. Their one shared recreation was long bicycle trips and journeys abroad, which brought them even closer. Maria had found a new love, a partner and scientific collaborator that she could depend on.[12]


Pierre and Marie Curie in their Paris lab before April 19, 1906 (when he died).
Eventually they studied radioactive materials, particularly pitchblende, the complex mineral from which uranium was extracted. By April 1898, Skłodowska–Curie deduced that pitchblende must contain traces of an unknown substance far more radioactive than uranium. In July 1898, Pierre and Marie together published an article announcing the existence of an element which they named "polonium," in honor of her native Poland, then still partitioned among three empires. On December 26, 1898, the Curies announced the existence of a second element, which they named "radium" for its intense radioactivity — a word that they coined.
Over the course of four years of the most arduous work in the most difficult physical conditions, they processed a ton of pitchblende, eventually in 1902 isolating one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride. By 1910 Marie, working on without her husband, who had been killed in 1906, would isolate the pure radium metal. In an unusual decision, Skłodowska-Curie intentionally refrained from patenting the radium-isolation process so that the scientific community could do research unhindered.
Since they were unaware of the deleterious effects of radiation exposure attendant on their chronic unprotected work with radioactive substances, Marie and Pierre had no idea what price they were paying for their research.[13]
In 1903, under the supervision of Henri Becquerel,[14] Marie received her DSc from the University of Paris, becoming the first woman in France to complete a doctorate.
Marie also saw to it that Pierre completed his own long-deferred doctorate. At the time, a witticism circulated that "Pierre's greatest discovery was Maria, and then she discovered radioactivity." [15]


Maria Skłodowska–Curie's 1911 Nobel Prize diploma
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."
Maria and Pierre were unable to go to Stockholm in person to receive the prize. They immediately, however, shared its financial proceeds with needy persons and acquaintances, including students.[16]
Skłodowska–Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Eight years later, she would receive 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."
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.[17] It would be her doctoral student, Marguerite Perey, who would be the first woman elected to the Academy — in 1962, over half a century after Pierre Curie's 1905 election.
On April 19, 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident as he was leaving a publisher's office. He had gone there to review proofs of an article, and found the business closed due to a strike. Heading back across the street in heavy rain, he was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle and fell under its wheels, fracturing his skull. While it has been speculated that he may previously have been weakened by prolonged radiation exposure, it has not been proven that this was the cause of the accident.
Marie was devastated by her husband's death. She noted that as of that moment she had suddenly become "an incurably and wretchedly lonely person." Nevertheless, she courageously undertook to carry on at the Sorbonne the physics course that Pierre had been teaching, and she sought in her exhausting work regime a meaning for her life. Paradoxically, recognition for her work now grew to a crescendo, and in 1911 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded her her second Nobel Prize. A delegation of celebrated Polish men of learning, headed by world-famous novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, besought her to return to Poland and continue her research in her native country.[18]
After Pierre's death, Marie may have had an affair with physicist Paul Langevin[citation needed] — a married man who had left his wife — which resulted in a press scandal, exploited by her academic opponents. Despite her fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude to the scandal tended toward xenophobia. Later, Skłodowska–Curie's granddaughter, Hélène Joliot, would marry Langevin's grandson, Michel Langevin.
During World War I, Skłodowska-Curie pushed for the use of mobile radiography units, which came to be popularly known as petites Curies ("Little 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 triumphally, to raise funds for research on radium. These distractions from her scientific labors, and the attendant publicity, caused her much discomfort but provided 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.
Skłodowska–Curie visited Poland a last time in the spring of 1934.[19] Only a couple of months later, she was dead. Her death near Sallanches, Savoy, in 1934 was from aplastic anemia, almost certainly due to exposure to radiation. The damaging effects of ionizing radiation were then 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 that 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. Her laboratory is preserved in the Musée Curie.
The Curies' elder daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for discovering that aluminum could be made radioactive and emit neutrons when bombarded with alpha rays. The younger daughter, Ève Curie, wrote a biography of her late mother.
A year after the death of Skłodowska–Curie, in 1935, the Polish President's wife, Michalina Mościcka, unveiled a statue of the scientist before Warsaw's Oncology Center, housed in the building of the former Radium Institute that Skłodowska–Curie had founded. The monument suffered from gunfire during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, but when maintenance work was being done, it was decided not to remove these scars.[20]
In 1967, a museum devoted to Skłodowska–Curie was established in Warsaw's "New Town," in her birthplace on ulica Freta (Freta Street).