Marie Curie Marie Curie Marie Curie, a woman's passion for research
Marie Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1895, needs no introduction. Who isn't familiar with this physicist and chemist, winner of two prestigious Nobel Prizes and currently the only woman in the world to have received it twice?
Medicine or physics?
Born in Poland, which was under Russian occupation at the time, Marie Skłodowska wanted to pursue higher education, but this was forbidden for women in her native country. She then decided to leave for Paris in 1891, joining her sister who also chose France for her studies. She ended up studying Physics at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris.
The Paris Faculty of Sciences, which is now La Sorbonne, was then the main institution of higher scientific education in France. At this institution, in 1895, of the 776 students studying there, only 27 were women (and seven were of foreign origin).
In 1893, she graduated with top honors with a degree in Physics and, in 1894, she graduated with honors with a degree in Mathematics. In 1894, she was hired by the Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale, an association which sought to highlight France in this area of study. There, they allowed her to conduct research on the magnetic properties of various steels.
Agrégation, research and the Nobel Prize
It was in this research setting that she met Pierre Curie, Head of Physics at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry, who was also pursuing research on magnetic properties. The two researchers married in July 1895, and the following year, Marie Skłodowska, who now bore the name Curie, began studying for the Agrégation exam for teaching Mathematics, which she obtained in 1896 (and received a top score!!). At the same time, she began a PhD thesis on the subject of radiation produced by uranium.
Pierre and Marie Curie worked together from that point on. In 1898, they discovered two new elements: polonium and radium. It was this important discovery that made them eligible for the Nobel Prize, and the Curies jointly won it in 1903 in the area of Physics. Marie Curie was thus the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.
After her husband's death in 1906, Marie Curie was appointed laboratory director and became the first female university professor in France. It's said that the scientist's first lecture at the Sorbonne on November 5, 1906, was a major event attended by many students, journalists and curious onlookers. In 1911, a second Nobel Prize, this time for Chemistry, was awarded to her "in recognition of services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the new elements of radium and polonium, and by the study of their nature and their compounds."
An unwavering commitment
When war broke out in 1914, Marie Curie became involved in the design of mobile surgical units and would spend the next four years of the war developing this form of fixed and mobile radiology and training nurses in the use of x-ray equipment. Throughout her life, Marie Curie actively promoted the use of radium to relieve suffering.
Through the Red Cross, she managed to equip 18 mobile radiology units. These vehicles, nicknamed "Little Curies", allowed more than a million injured soliders to benefit from a proven technique for locating projectiles in the human body. In fact, it was often Marie Cure herself who regularly traveled to the front lines to take these X-rays.
It's because of her research and work around radium that Marie Curie would soon suffer from over exposure to radioactive elements. By the early 1920s, she had grown weak and began to believe that the radium to which she had devoted her life might have had something to do with her health problems. Nevertheless, she continued her research, specifically in the development of therapeutic approaches for fighting cancer, though she herself was suffering from leukemia. She died from it on July 4, 1934.
As the official Nobel Prize website writes, Marie Curie "quiet, dignified and modest, was held in high esteem and admired by scientists around the world ." France actually honored the two researchers, Marie and Pierre Curie, by transferring their ashes to the Panthéon on April 20, 1995.