Who was Marie Curie?

Maria arrived in Paris in late 1891, enrolled at the University of Paris, and lived on almost nothing, sometimes forgetting to eat while absorbed in her studies. By 1893 she had a degree in physics, and she earned a second degree in 1894. That same year she met Pierre Curie, an instructor at the city's industrial physics and chemistry school. They were introduced because she needed laboratory space; their shared obsession with science drew them into a partnership that became a marriage on 26 July 1895.

Working in a converted shed next to Pierre's institution — a former dissecting room that was neither properly ventilated nor waterproof — the Curies investigated uranium minerals. Marie had observed that pitchblende was four times more radioactive than uranium alone and concluded it must contain an unknown, highly active element. The reasoning was hers; Pierre eventually abandoned his own crystal research to join the effort. In July 1898 they jointly announced polonium, named for her occupied homeland. In December 1898 they announced radium. The word 'radioactivity' was also coined in the course of this work.

Isolating these elements in verifiable quantities required processing enormous amounts of ore. From one tonne of pitchblende, a tenth of a gram of radium chloride was finally separated in 1902. Pure radium metal was isolated in 1910. Polonium, with a half-life of only 138 days, was never successfully isolated. The Curies did not patent the isolation process, deliberately leaving it open for other researchers to use without restriction.

In December 1903 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Critically, the committee had initially planned to honor only Pierre and Becquerel; a Swedish mathematician on the committee, Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre to the omission, and after Pierre objected, Marie's name was added. The prize money allowed the couple to hire their first laboratory assistant.

Pierre died on 19 April 1906, struck by a horse-drawn vehicle on the Rue Dauphine in Paris, his skull fractured instantly. The University of Paris offered his chair to Marie, and she accepted it, becoming the first woman to hold a professorship there. She continued research and in 1910 succeeded in defining an international standard for radioactive emissions, eventually named the curie after her and Pierre. In 1911 the French Academy of Sciences refused her membership by one or two votes. That same year a press scandal erupted over her relationship with physicist Paul Langevin; the tabloid coverage was openly xenophobic and antisemitic, misrepresenting her as a foreign home-wrecker despite her decades of contribution to French science.

The Royal Swedish Academy, overriding the controversy, awarded Curie the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of polonium and radium and the isolation and study of radium. She became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and remains one of only two individuals to receive prizes in two different scientific fields. When the Nobel committee chair attempted to discourage her attendance over her personal life, she replied that the prize had been awarded for her scientific discoveries and that her private life was a separate matter. She attended the ceremony.

When war began in 1914, Curie recognized that rapid surgical intervention could save soldiers who would otherwise lose limbs or die, and that surgeons near the front had no access to radiological equipment. She taught herself the necessary anatomy, radiology, and automotive mechanics, then assembled mobile X-ray vehicles that became known informally as petites Curies, or Little Curies. She became director of the Red Cross Radiology Service and established France's first military radiology centre before the end of 1914.

In the first year alone she oversaw the installation of twenty mobile radiological vehicles and two hundred radiological units at field hospitals. Her seventeen-year-old daughter Irène assisted her in the early period, and Curie later trained other women as radiological aides. In 1915 she produced hollow needles filled with radon gas — drawn from her own gram of radium — for sterilising infected tissue. Estimates place the number of soldiers treated by her X-ray units at over one million. Despite all of this, the French government never formally recognized her wartime contribution.

After the war Curie focused on building lasting infrastructure for science. She had founded the Curie Institute in Paris in 1920 and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932, the latter with her sister Bronisława as director. The Paris institute, developed jointly with the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris, eventually became one of the world's leading radioactivity research laboratories. Under Curie's direction it produced four further Nobel Prize winners, including her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and Irène's husband Frédéric.

Curie made two fundraising tours of the United States, in 1921 and 1929, to secure radium and funding for research she could not obtain from French public sources. She sat on the League of Nations' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation from 1922 until 1934, working alongside Albert Einstein and others on international scientific coordination. In 1930 she was elected to the International Atomic Weights Committee.

She visited Poland for the last time in early 1934. On 4 July 1934 she died at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, Haute-Savoie, France, of aplastic anaemia attributed to decades of radiation exposure. She had carried radioactive isotopes in her pockets, stored them in her desk, and operated unshielded X-ray equipment in field hospitals — all before the biological dangers of ionising radiation were understood. In 1995 her remains, along with Pierre's, were transferred to the Paris Panthéon, sealed in lead because of residual radioactivity. She was the first woman interred there on the basis of her own achievements.