Marie Curie

Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie (née Skłodowska; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), better known as Marie Curie, was a Polish and naturalised French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, for their joint research on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the elements radium and polonium, and for studying radium and its compounds.

Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. She and Pierre were the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize, which started the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. In 1906, she became the first woman to be a professor at the University of Paris.

Curie was born in Warsaw, in the Russian Empire, where she studied at the secret Flying University and began her practical scientific training. In 1891, she followed her older sister Bronisława to Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and carried out her later scientific work. In 1895, she married Pierre, and together they carried out pioneering research on radioactivity, a term she coined. Pierre died in 1906 in an accident on a Paris street.

Under Curie's direction, the world's first studies were carried out on treating neoplasms using radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institute in Paris in 1920 and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932, and both remain major medical research centres. During the First World War, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals. Although she was a French citizen, she never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them to visit Poland, and she named the first chemical element she and Pierre discovered, polonium, after her homeland.

Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, Haute-Savoie, France, of aplastic anaemia, which was likely caused by exposure to radiation during her research and her radiological work at field hospitals in the First World War. In 1995, she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Paris Panthéon. Poland declared 2011 the Year of Marie Curie during the International Year of Chemistry. She is the subject of many biographies, including Madame Curie by her daughter Ève, and the synthetic element curium is named in her honour.

Life and career

Maria Skłodowska was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, in Congress Poland, which was part of the Russian Empire. Because women could not enrol in regular universities, she and her sister joined the secret Flying University, a Polish learning institution that admitted women. In late 1891 she moved to France, where she studied at the University of Paris. There she met Pierre Curie, who shared her interest in science. They married in 1895 in Sceaux, and they worked together on research into radioactivity. In 1898 they announced two new elements, polonium and radium, and they coined the word "radioactivity." Marie later separated radium in pure form. In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, becoming the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on radium and polonium.

After Pierre died in a road accident in 1906, Marie continued her work and headed the Radium Institute in Paris. During the First World War, she set up mobile X-ray units to help wounded soldiers. She died on 4 July 1934 at a sanatorium in Passy, from an illness believed to have been caused by her long exposure to radiation. In 1995 her remains and Pierre's were moved to the Panthéon in Paris.

Legacy

The Curies' work helped shape the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Curie's work laid the foundation for modern nuclear physics, cancer treatments, and radiography, and her techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes are still used in research and medicine. Cornell University professor L. Pearce Williams explains that the discovery of radium was epoch-making. It forced scientists to rethink the foundations of physics and gave researchers such as Ernest Rutherford a way to study the structure of the atom. Radium also seemed to offer a way to attack cancer.

Curie's work also changed how people viewed women in science. She had to overcome barriers in both Poland and France because she was a woman, and she mentored female scientists at the Radium Institute. She was known for her honesty and simple way of living. She gave much of her first Nobel Prize money to friends, family, students, and research partners, and she chose not to patent the radium-isolation process so that other scientists could do research freely. She and her husband often refused awards and medals. Albert Einstein reportedly said that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.

Commemorations

Marie Curie is one of the most famous scientists in history and has become an icon in the scientific world. She has received tributes from around the globe, even in pop culture. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two, and the only person to win in multiple sciences. She won the Nobel Prize in Physics and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Many things have been named after her. The curie, a unit of radioactivity, is named in her honour and in honour of Pierre Curie. The element with atomic number 96 was named curium. She has also been the subject of books, films, and plays, and she has appeared on more than 600 postage stamps. In 2026, she and her daughter Irène were announced as among 72 historical women in STEM whose names have been proposed to be added to the 72 men already celebrated on the Eiffel Tower.