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Maria Skłodowska-Curie, better known as Marie Curie (Curie was the surname of her husband, Pierre Curie) or Madame Curie (Warsaw, 7 November 1867 - Paris, 4 July 1934) was a Polish physicist and chemist, a pioneer in the study of radiation. She shared with Pierre Curie —her husband— one half of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics —the other half went to Henri Becquerel, for their discoveries in the field of radioactivity. In 1911 she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the isolation of pure radium. She was the first to use the term radioactivity.
Marie was a naturalized French citizen and was an actively loyal citizen of her new country, but she never lost her sense of Polish identity. The first chemical element she discovered, in 1898, she named polonium in homage to her country of origin.
Study of radioactivity
With her husband, she studied radioactive materials and in particular uraninite, which had the curious property of being more radioactive than the uranium that was extracted from it. The logical explanation was to assume that uraninite contained traces of some element much more radioactive than uranium itself. After several years of constant work, with the concentration of various types of uraninite, they isolated two new chemical elements. The first they decided to call polonium, in reference to her native country, and the other, radium, due to its intense radioactivity. With a disinterested attitude, she did not patent the process of isolating radium, leaving it open to research by the entire scientific community.
On 19 April 1906, her husband Pierre Curie died, after being run over by a carriage in the streets of Paris. Although she was deeply affected by the event, she continued her work and assumed her husband's chair on 5 November 1906, 650 years after the last woman to hold it. She was the first female professor at the Sorbonne, and two years later she was also the first full professor.
Marie Curie continued working and managed to purify a few decigrams of radium chloride, making a new measurement of its atomic weight. At the same time she published a classification of radioelements and a table of radioactive constants. She also managed to prepare the first international standard of radium which consists of a glass tube containing twenty-one milligrams of pure radium chloride and which she deposited at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres.
In 1910, Marie managed to isolate a gram of pure radium and the following year she was the only woman to participate in the first Solvay conference, which brought together all the international luminaries of the world of physics: Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Marcel Brillouin, Maurice de Broglie, Jean Perrin, Henri Poincaré and Marie Curie.
Recent years
After the death of her husband, Marie Curie moved to Sceaux with her daughters, her father-in-law, who died a few years later, and a governess. She had an affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin, which led to a journalistic scandal with xenophobic overtones. Due to this scandal, Marie's health suffered and she went to England to live with fellow physicist Hertha Ayrton under an assumed name, away from the laboratories for a year.
During World War I, Curie proposed the use of mobile radiography for the treatment of wounded soldiers. In 1921, she published a book (La radiologie et la guerre), and visited the United States, where she was received triumphantly, with the intention of raising funds for scientific research. In her later years, she was harassed by many physicists and cosmetics manufacturers, who used radioactive material without precautions.
Curie died near the French town of Salanches on 4 July 1934 from leukemia, probably due to massive exposure to radiation during her work.[citation needed] With Pierre Curie, she had two daughters, one of whom, Irène Joliot-Curie, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, along with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Since 1995, the remains of Marie and Pierre Curie have rested in the Pantheon in Paris. The then President of France, François Mitterrand, ordered their transfer shortly after Simone Veil had written to him in which she said that not having a woman in the Pantheon was a denial of what women had contributed to the country in the past.
Nobel Prizes
On 10 December 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie received one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics—she was the first woman to receive it—"in recognition of the extraordinary services rendered in their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Henri Becquerel." The other half of the prize went to Becquerel.
Initially, only the names of Becquerel and Pierre Curie had been proposed to receive the prize, but when Curie found out, she sent a letter to the members of the committee asking them to make up for the omission, since Marie Curie had been the initiator of the research and her work was inseparable from his. The Curies, however, did not attend the award ceremony, partly due to the overload of work and partly due to Pierre's poor health. However, in June 1905, they collected it in Stockholm from King Oscar II of Sweden.
In 1911, Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this element."
He was the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes in two different categories, only equaled by Linus Pauling.
