MARIE CURIE: BIOGRAPHY, DISCOVERIES, CONTRIBUTIONS AND AWARDS - ARTE - 2025

Marie Curie (1867 - 1934) was a French scientist of Polish origin, famous for her work in the field of radioactivity. She has been, until today, one of the most important women in science. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, an honor she received along with her husband, Pierre Curie. The recognition was awarded to the couple in the Physics category for their research into the radiation phenomenon discovered by Henri Becquerel.

Years later, his discovery of the radioactive elements, radium and polonium, earned him a second Nobel Prize, but this time in Chemistry. In this way, she became the only person to be awarded in two different scientific categories by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Marie Curie, by Nobel foundation via Wikimedia Commons

His research in the field of radiation led to its medical use, which began to be used to assist surgeons during the First World War. Among other things, the use of X-rays was very helpful to the wounded.

Marie Curie was born in Warsaw and learned to love science from her father, who was a professor of physics and mathematics. In order to train, in addition to the education she had received at home and primary studies, she had to enter a clandestine university in her hometown.

The situation was tense in Poland, so Marie followed her sister to Paris, where she could study freely and there she obtained her degree as a graduate in Physics and Mathematics at the Sorbonne University.

At that time she met a physics teacher who became her husband, Pierre Curie, with whom she had two daughters. She was the first woman to hold the position as Professor of Physics at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris years later.

During the war, Curie actively supported the French cause. She donated money and even offered her Nobel Prize gold medals, which was not accepted by the French government.

Despite that, Curie used the prize money to support the state, although she did not expect much and even signed that "that money would probably be lost."

She was the founder of one of the most important centers for research in medicine, biology and biophysics: the Curie Institute, together with Claudius Regaud, in 1920. The main interest was the advancement in the treatment of cancer by radiotherapy.

Although Curie obtained French nationality, she never stopped identifying with her country of origin and from wherever she was, she continued to be interested and committed to collaborating with Poland, especially in the independence cause.

The scientist also traveled to the United States of America in order to raise funds for her research in radioactivity and that goal was quickly achieved.

Marie Curie in her lab, by Internet Archive Book Images via Wikimedia Commons

In America, Marie Curie was received as a heroine, her name was recognized and she was introduced to the most exclusive circles of the country. In addition, she traveled to other nations where she appeared at conferences to disseminate knowledge about her specialty.

Curie was part of the League of Nations, which promoted peace between countries, along with scientists of the stature of Lorentz and Einstein. Among others, they were members of the Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, which was an attempt prior to modern organizations such as Unesco.

She died of aplastic anemia in 1934. Curie was one of the first to experiment with radiation, and the dangers it represented were alien to her. During her life she did not have the precautions that are now standard for working with radioactive elements.

Biography

Early years

Maria Skłodowska was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, then part of the Polish Congress of the Russian Empire. She was the daughter of a Physics and Mathematics teacher named Władysław Skłodowski, with his wife Bronisława Boguska, who was an educator and musician.

The eldest of her sisters was named Zofia (1862), she was followed by the only male named Józef (1863), then Bronisława (1865), Helena (1866) and finally María, who was the youngest.

The family was not well off during Marie's childhood. Both branches were sympathetic to Polish nationalist ideas and had lost their assets by financing the cause of the independence of their country.

Marie Curie at 16, by Unknown photographer via Wikimedia Commons

The Skłodowski family had been involved with education for several generations. Marie's grandfather had also been a teacher and her father was director of educational institutions for boys on several occasions.

But because of the family's and Władysław's past with nationalism, he was eventually fired from his post as an educator. Marie's mother died in 1878 from tuberculosis, and the eldest daughter, Zofia, had also died of typhus.

Those early losses took a toll on Marie's faith, who has since considered herself an agnostic.

Education

From a young age, the five children of the Skłodowski family were instructed in Polish culture, which was then prohibited by the Government, directed at the time by representatives of the Russian Empire.

Marie's father took it upon himself to provide science literacy to children, especially after labs were banned from schools in Poland. Since Władysław had access to the material, he brought home what he could and instructed his children with it.

At the age of ten, Marie entered a boarding school for girls called J. Sikorska. Then she went to a "gymnasium," a name for secondary schools, and graduated with a gold medal in June 1883, when she was 15 years old.

After graduation, he spent time in the field. Some say that this withdrawal was prompted by a depressive episode. Later she moved to Warsaw with her father and worked as a governess.

She and her sister Bronisława could not formally access higher education, so they entered a clandestine institution known as the Flying University, closely related to Polish nationalism.

Marie decided to help Bronisława cover her expenses to study medicine in Paris on the condition that later her sister would do the same for her. So Marie accepted a position as a resident governess with a family named Żorawskis.

Paris

At the end of 1891, when Marie was 24 years old, she moved to the French capital. She first came to the home of her sister Bronisława, who had married Kazimierz D gloryłuski, a Polish physicist. Later she rented an attic near the University of Paris, where she enrolled to complete her studies.

During that time he lived in very poor conditions, protected himself from the cold by wearing all his clothes at the same time and ate little. However, Marie never neglected the main focus of her stay in the French capital, which was her education.

Pierre Curie et Marie Sklodowska Curie c. 1895, by Unknown va Wikimedia Commons

She worked as a tutor in the afternoons, but her salary was not enough for much. It simply allowed her to pay the most basic expenses. In 1893 she managed to obtain her degree in Physics and thus got her first scientific job in the laboratory of Professor Gabriel Lippmann.

Despite this, he continued studying and a year later he obtained a second degree at the same university, this time in Mathematics. So, he had managed to get a scholarship from the Alexandrowitch Foundation.

Among the pleasures of Parisian society, the one that most interested Marie Skłodowska was amateur theater, which she attended regularly and through which she made friends such as that of the musician Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

Race

the beginning

In 1894 Marie Skłodowska began to work on an investigation about the magnetic properties of various steels. It had been commissioned by the Society for the Promotion of National Industry.

That year Marie met Pierre Curie, who taught at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chemie Industrial de Paris. At that time, she needed a more spacious laboratory for her work and Józef Kowalski-Wierusz presented them because he thought that Curie could provide it.

Pierre found Marie a comfortable place within the institute where she worked and from then on they became very close, especially because they shared scientific interests. Finally, Pierre proposed to her and Marie rejected him.

She had planned to return to Poland and thought that this would be a brake on Curie's intentions, who told her that he was willing to go with her, even if it meant that he had to sacrifice his scientific career.

Marie Skłodowska returned to Warsaw in the summer of 1894, where she learned that her dreams of practicing in Poland were unrealizable after she was denied a position at the University of Krakow because she was a woman.

Towards radiation

Pierre insisted that he return to Paris to pursue a doctorate. Some time ago Marie herself had prompted Curie to write the work on magnetism with which Pierre obtained his Ph.D. in 1895.

The couple were married on July 26, 1895. Since then both were known as the Curie marriage and later became one of the most important couples in science.

When Marie began to search for a topic for her doctoral thesis, she spoke with Pierre about Henri Becquerel's discovery of uranium salts and the light that emanated from them, which, until then, was an unknown phenomenon.

At the same time Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered X-rays, whose nature was also unknown, but they had an appearance similar to that of light from uranium salts. This phenomenon was different from phosphorescence in that it did not appear to use external energy.

Using a device that Jacques and Pierre Curie had modified, called an electrometer, Marie found that around uranium the air becomes a conductor of electricity. It was then that she thought that the radiation came from the atom itself and not from the interaction between molecules.

In 1897 Irene, the first daughter of the Curies, was born. At that time, Marie took a teaching position at the Escuela Normal Superior.

Research

In her experiments, Curie discovered that there were other elements besides uranium that were radioactive, including thorium. But that finding had been published before by Gerhard Carl Schmidt at the German Physical Society.

However, that was not the only thing he discovered: he had found that pitchblende and torbenite also had radiation levels higher than uranium. So he set about trying to find out what was the element that made those minerals so radioactive.

Marie Curie in her laboratory, by Musée Curie via Wikimedia Commons

In 1898 the Curies published an article in which they showed the existence of a new element that they named “polonium”, in honor of Marie's country of origin. Months later they indicated that they had discovered another element: radium. There the word radioactivity was used for the first time.

In experimentation they managed to isolate traces of polonium with relative ease, while radium took them longer and it was not until 1902 that they were able to separate a small portion of radium chloride without barium contamination.

The road to the Nobel Prize

They studied the properties of both elements, which occupied most of their time between 1898 and 1902, and in parallel they published more than 32 works.

In 1900 Marie Curie became the first female professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and Pierre obtained a professorship at the University of Paris.

Beginning in 1900, the Academy of Sciences took an interest in the research of the Curie spouses and provided them with resources on different occasions to finance the work of both scientists. In June 1903 Marie Curie defended her doctoral thesis and received a cum laude mention.

Marie Curie c. 1903, by Unknown via Wikimedia Commons

In December of the same year, after having achieved some renown for their work in European intellectual circles, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in physics to Marie Curie, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel.

It was planned to give the recognition only to Becquerel and Pierre Curie, but upon learning of this the latter wrote a complaint requesting that Marie's name be included among the winners. In this way she became the first woman to receive such an award.

In December 1904 the Curies had their second daughter named Eve. They made sure that both girls spoke Polish and were educated in their culture, so they frequented Poland together with them.

After fame

In 1905 Pierre Curie rejected a proposal from the University of Geneva. Then the University of Paris awarded him a teaching position and, at Pierre's request, they agreed to set up a laboratory.

Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory, c. 1904, by Unknown via Wikimedia Commons

The following year, on April 19, Pierre Curie died in an accident: he was run over by a carriage and fell between its wheels, which fractured his skull.

In May, the University of Paris announced to Marie Curie that they wanted the position assigned to her husband to be filled by her. This is how she became the first woman to obtain the position of professor at that institution.

It was not until 1910 that Marie Curie managed to isolate radium in its purest form. Then, the standard measure of radioactive emissions was defined and it was called the “curie”, in honor of Pierre.

Despite her prestige, Marie Curie was never accepted into the French Academy of Sciences. On the contrary, she was regularly despised by the media who directed xenophobic and misogynistic comments to her.

Second Nobel Prize

In 1911, Marie Curie received a second Nobel Prize. At that time in the Chemistry category, for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature of said element.

In this way he became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes and the only person to have won the award in two different areas of science. The other multiple winner to date has been Linus Pauling with the categories of Chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize.

During 1912 he took a long vacation. Curie spent little more than a year away from public life. It is said that she suffered from another depressive episode that was linked to kidney problems for which she had to undergo surgery.

Marie Curie c. 1912, by unattributed via Wikimedia Commons

In 1913 she felt recovered and turned again to scientific work, especially to the study of the properties of radium at low temperatures, which she did together with Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.

However, the progress that Curie had been making came to a halt with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

First World War

Marie Curie dedicated herself to supporting the French cause with all means available to her. She had planned to stay at the Radio Institute to protect her, but the Government decided that she should move to Bordeaux.

Practically at the beginning of the conflict, Curie tried to donate her Nobel Prize medals that were made of solid gold, since she saw no benefit. However, her offer was rejected. So, she used the prize money to buy war bonds.

Marie Curie thought that it would be very useful for hospitals treating the war wounded to have X-ray machines on hand. In addition, she promoted the implementation of the use of mobile radiography, which was adapted to radiological ambulances.

He headed the Radiology Service of the French Red Cross and created a military radiology center in the nation. He trained numerous nurses in the use of X-ray machines so that the project could be successful.

He implemented the sterilization treatment of tissues infected with "radio fumes" (radon).

Last years

After the war, Marie Curie planned a trip to raise funds for her radiological research. During the conflict, most of the inventory of the Radio Institute had been donated for medical purposes, and since then the price of radio had risen considerably.

President Warren G. Harding received Marie Curie personally in 1921 and presented her with a gram of radium that had been mined in the United States. On her tour she toured Spain, Brazil, Belgium and Czechoslovakia.

Marie Curie with President Harding, by Agence Rol. Agence photographique via Wikimedia Commons

In 1922 Curie was included in the French Academy of Medicine and also in the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, an entity that promoted world peace, predecessors of Unesco and the UN respectively.

Marie Curie traveled to Poland in 1925 for the foundation of the Warsaw Radio Institute. Four years later, she returned to the United States of America, on that occasion she obtained what was necessary to equip the new Institute.

In 1930 she was selected as part of the International Committee on Atomic Weights, now known as the Commission on Isotope Abundance and Atomic Weights.

Public activities distracted her from her studies and that was not pleasant for her, but she knew it was necessary to be able to raise funds and build institutes where others could expand their work in radioactivity.

Death

Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934 at the Sancellemoz de Passy sanatorium, a community in Haute-Savoie, France. She was the victim of aplastic anemia that is presumed to have contracted from radiation exposure for much of her life.

While Marie and Pierre investigated, the damage that radiation could generate in the human body was not known, so the precautions and safety measures during its handling were practically nil.

At that time Marie frequently carried radioactive isotopes with her. Curie conducted the experiments without any protection, in the same way that she operated X-ray machines while serving in World War I.

His mortal remains were deposited together with those of Pierre Curie in Sceaux, south of Paris. In 1995 the bodies of both scientists were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris. She was also the first woman whose remains entered the compound on their own merits.

Curie's belongings cannot be handled today as they still possess high levels of radioactivity. They are kept in lead-lined containers and a special suit must be worn to handle them.

His office and laboratory at the Institute of Radio were converted into the Curie Museum.

Discoveries

Radioactivity

Conrad Roentgen discovered X-rays in December 1895, and the news was groundbreaking among scientists. At the beginning of the following year, Poincaré showed that this phenomenon produced a kind of phosphorescence that clung to the walls of the test tube.

Henri Becquerel said, for his part, that the light that was present in uranium salts was not similar to any other phosphorescent material with which he had worked until then.

At that time Marie Curie was looking for a topic for her doctoral thesis and decided to choose “uranium rays”. Its original theme was the ionization capacity of the rays that were expelled by uranium salts.

Marie and Pierre Curie, by Smithsonian Institution via Wikimedia Commons

Pierre and his brother, Jacques, had invented a modified electrometer long before Marie's project, but she used it in order to carry out the necessary experiments with uranium.

Thus he realized that the rays emitted by the salts made the air that was nearby conducting electricity.

Experimentation

According to the Marie Curie hypothesis, radioactivity was not the consequence of an interaction between molecules, but it emanated directly from the uranium atom. Then, she continued to study other minerals that possessed radioactivity.

Curie had assumed that the amount of uranium must be related to radioactivity. For this reason, in the other materials, which were much more radioactive than uranium, other elements must be present that also emitted radiation, but to a greater extent.

He discovered that thorium was also radioactive, but couldn't take credit for that as that finding had been published some time earlier by German physicist Gerhard Carl Schmidt.

Elements

The Curie couple did not abandon their search and in July 1898, the couple presented a work in which they disclosed that they had found a new element that they called “polonium”, in honor of Marie's origins.

In December of the same year the Curies again had an announcement, the discovery of the element "radio", which in Latin means lightning. It was then that Marie Curie first coined the term "radioactivity".

Using bismuth, they managed to find an element that had characteristics similar to this, but also had radioactive properties, that element was polonium.

Five months later they obtained radio traces, but could not find the element totally isolated, since its relationship with barium was strong.

In 1902 they managed to separate one decigram of radium chloride from one ton of pitchblende. That was enough for Marie Curie to determine the new element's atomic mass and other physical properties.

Polonium could never be isolated by the Curies in its pure state, but radium was in 1910.

Other contributions

Medicine

In addition to her discovery of chemical elements, Marie Curie tried to find uses for radiation that could serve noble purposes, such as the treatment of different diseases.

Marie Curie. Flickr {National Archief} via Wikimedia Commons

He discovered that malignant or diseased cells are the first to be affected by radiation, while healthy cells resist for longer. This was the window into the radiological treatments that are used today.

During the First World War, Marie Curie believed that military hospitals should have X-ray machines to inspect the wounds or fractures of combatants and she lent her full support to the cause.

He also thought that if the X-ray equipment could be adapted to mobile units, it would be even easier and more efficient to use them for emergency surgeries. Later, he was in charge of training personnel to use this technology.

Likewise, he used radon, which he referred to as radio fumes, to disinfect wounds.

Investigation

Marie Curie was in charge of promoting research in radiology to deepen knowledge on the subject and in the application of radioactivity. Especially through the Institute of Radio with offices in Paris and Warsaw, which was later renamed the Curie Institute.

He raised funds to equip laboratories and to be able to buy material with which to carry out the experimentation, which after the First World War had become extremely expensive, reaching a price of a gram of radio at that time in 100,000 US dollars.

Although on certain occasions she had to separate herself from what she really liked, which was research, she knew how to assume her role as a public figure to allow other generations to have the opportunity to work with the foundations that she laid.

Likewise, Curie agreed to be included in different committees and organizations that promoted the integration of nations. She never rejected her role in society, but on the contrary, she was a woman committed to humanity.

Awards and honors

She was one of the most representative women for science, so much so that Marie Curie has become an icon of popular culture.

Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, later she was the first person to win it in two different categories, and so far she is the only person to have been honored in two different branches of science.

After her death Marie Curie became the first woman to be buried in the Pantheon in Paris on her own merits (1995). Also the element curium, which was discovered in 1944, was named in honor of Marie and Pierre.

Many institutions have been named to honor Marie Curie, including the institutes that she helped found, then as the Institute of Radio, which later became the Curie Institute (Paris) and the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Institute of Oncology (Warsaw).

Her Paris laboratory was transformed into a museum and has been open to the public since 1992. Also on Freta Street in Warsaw, where Marie was born, a museum named after her was created in her honor.

- Nobel Prize in Physics, 1903 (together with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel).

- Davy Medal, 1903 (together with Pierre Curie).

- Actonian Prize, 1907.

- Elliott Cresson Medal, 1909.

- Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1911.

- Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society, 1921.

References

1. Encyclopedia Britannica. (2019). Marie Curie - Biography & Facts. Available at: britannica.com.
2. Nobel Media AB (2019). Marie Curie - Biographical. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1903. NobelPrize.org. Available at: nobelprize.org.
3. En.wikipedia.org. (2019). Marie Curie. Available at: en.wikipedia.org.
4. Rockwell, S. (2003). The Life and Legacy of Marie Curie. YALE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE, 76 (4 - 6), pp. 167 - 180.
5. National Institute of Standards and Technology - US Department of Commerce. (2009). 1921: Marie Curie visits the US. Available at: nist.gov.
6. Bagley, M. (2013). Marie Curie: Facts & Biography. Live Science. Available at: livescience.com.