Marie Curie

Early life in partitioned Poland

Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, in the Russian-controlled portion of partitioned Poland. Her father Władysław was a teacher of mathematics and physics; her mother Bronisława was the principal of a Warsaw girls' school. The family was educated but financially modest; both parents lost their teaching positions due to involvement in Polish nationalist activity, which substantially worsened the family's circumstances during Maria's childhood.

Maria graduated from a Russian-government girls' high school in 1883 at age 15, with a gold medal as top student. Polish women were excluded from university study at the time. Maria spent several years working as a tutor and governess in Polish households while supporting her older sister Bronisława's medical studies in Paris (a private agreement: Maria would work and send money while Bronisława studied; Bronisława would then do the same when Maria began her own studies).

During this period Maria also studied independently at the "Flying University" (Uniwersytet Latający), an illegal Polish-language higher-education organization that taught Polish women and intellectuals subjects forbidden under Russian rule. The Flying University was clandestine; classes were held in different private apartments week to week to avoid detection. Maria's scientific education effectively began there.

Paris: the Sorbonne and the meeting with Pierre Curie

In 1891 Maria moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne (then formally the Faculté des Sciences de Paris). She completed degrees in physics (1893, first in her class) and mathematics (1894, second in her class). Her early Paris years were extremely lean; her own later account described periods when she had only tea, bread, and butter to eat.

In 1894 she met Pierre Curie, a physicist at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI). Pierre was already a substantial physicist - he and his brother Jacques had discovered piezoelectricity in 1880 - and was 8 years older than Maria. They married in July 1895 in a civil ceremony; Maria became Marie Curie.

Pierre and Marie set up a small joint laboratory at the ESPCI. The laboratory was famously inadequate - a converted shed - but it became the site of the work that would result in the discovery of radioactivity.

The discovery of polonium and radium (1898) and the 1903 Nobel Prize

In 1896 Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts spontaneously emit a then-mysterious radiation. Marie Curie began her doctoral thesis work on this phenomenon - which she renamed "radioactivity" - in late 1897, systematically studying the emissions from a wide range of mineral samples.

In July 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie announced the discovery of a new element, polonium (named for Marie's native Poland), in pitchblende ore. In December 1898 they announced the discovery of a second new element, radium. Both discoveries required the chemical isolation of trace quantities from many tons of pitchblende - extraordinarily laborious work conducted in the inadequate laboratory shed over years.

The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel for the discovery of radioactivity. Marie Curie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. The award initially proposed only Pierre and Becquerel; Pierre insisted Marie be included, and the committee was eventually persuaded.

Pierre's death (1906) and the 1911 Nobel Prize

On April 19, 1906, Pierre Curie was killed in a Paris street accident - run over by a horse-drawn cart on rue Dauphine. Marie became a widow at 38 with two young daughters (Irène, then 8, and Ève, then 1).

Marie was appointed to Pierre's professorship at the Sorbonne the following month - the first woman ever to hold a Sorbonne professorship. She continued the research program they had been conducting jointly, increasingly focused on the chemistry of radium - the isolation of pure radium chloride, the determination of its atomic weight, and the characterization of its radioactive emissions.

In 1911 she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for the isolation of polonium and radium. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific disciplines. The 1911 award was made over substantial controversy - the announcement coincided with the publication of letters indicating a romantic relationship between Marie and the married physicist Paul Langevin, which produced enormous press coverage and personal attacks. The Nobel Committee briefly attempted to withdraw the award; Marie attended the Stockholm ceremony anyway.

World War I, the Curie Institute, and the radiation legacy

During World War I (1914-1918) Marie Curie equipped 20 mobile X-ray units ("petites Curies") for use at field hospitals. She drove one of the units herself, training her teenage daughter Irène alongside her as a radiographer. The petites Curies and the additional 200 fixed X-ray stations Curie equipped during the war substantially expanded the medical use of X-ray diagnosis in casualties; approximately one million wounded soldiers received X-ray examinations through these stations.

In the 1920s she founded the Curie Institute in Paris (originally the Radium Institute), which has been the central French research institution on radioactivity since its establishment. She also founded a Polish branch in Warsaw (the Maria Skłodowska-Curie Institute of Oncology), which continues to function.

She died July 4, 1934, in the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, France, of aplastic anemia almost certainly caused by long-term radiation exposure. Her notebooks remain so radioactively contaminated that they are kept in lead-lined boxes and accessed only with protective clothing. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie went on to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1935) for the discovery of artificial radioactivity. The Curie family is the only family in history with five Nobel Prize winners across two generations.

Timeline

• 1867Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw.
• 1883Graduates first in her high-school class in Warsaw.
• 1891Moves to Paris and enrolls at the Sorbonne.
• 1893First in her class in physics at the Sorbonne.
• 1894Meets Pierre Curie.
• 1895Marries Pierre Curie.
• 1898Discovers polonium (July) and radium (December) with Pierre.
• 1903Nobel Prize in Physics (with Pierre and Becquerel). PhD thesis defense.
• 1906Pierre killed in street accident. Marie appointed to his Sorbonne professorship.
• 1911Nobel Prize in Chemistry (solo). Langevin affair controversy.
• 1914World War I begins; Curie develops mobile X-ray units (the "petites Curies").
• 1920Founds the Curie Institute in Paris.
• 1934Dies of aplastic anemia at Sancellemoz sanatorium at age 66.
• 1935Daughter Irène Joliot-Curie awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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