Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867-1934)
was born into an intellectual family in Warsaw. After her father lost his
teaching job due to his political activism, the family struggled financially.
Her sister died of typhus and then she lost her mother to TB.
Clever Marie was educated locally
and got some scientific training from her father. Girls could not attend universities
in Poland, so Marie earned her skimpy living through private tutoring and
working in a laboratory.
Her sister Bronya was studying
medicine in Paris where some universities already admitted women. In Sep 1891
Marie moved in with Bronya and when classes began at the Sorbonne in 1891,
Marie enrolled as a Physics & Mathematical Sciences student. By 1894
she was looking for a laboratory where she could work on her research
project, the measurement of the magnetic properties of various steel alloys.
She visited Pierre Curie at the School of Physics &
Chemistry at Paris University in 1894, and they married a year
later.
Research didn’t pay much, so the Curies had to do a lot of teaching to earn a living. In 1897 the couple's first daughter (Irène) was born and it was then that the Curies were building on the work of the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen. In particular they were examining the mysterious radiation from uranium discovered the year earlier by Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852–1908).
Antoine Henri Becquerel, Pierre and Marie Curie
Nobel Prize winners in Physics, 1903
Nobel Prize winners in Physics, 1903
Pierre invented instruments that could measure radiation. With these the Curies demonstrated that, no matter the form of uranium, it continued to radiate with an intensity proportional to the amount of uranium in the sample. Marie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues in enough quantities to allow for the careful study of its therapeutic properties.
While searching for other sources of radioactivity, the Curies turned to pitchblende, a mineral known for its uranium content. To their great surprise, the radioactivity of pitchblende far exceeded the combined radioactivity of the uranium and thorium contained in it.
From their laboratory, two successive papers reached the Academy of Sciences. In July 1898, they announced the discovery of a new radioactive element which the Curies named polonium after Marie's native country. The second paper, announcing the discovery of radium, was read at the Dec meeting. In 1898-1902 the Curies converted several tons of pitchblende, locating precious centigrams of radium.
Serious Science
They also published 32 scientific papers, one announcing that diseased, tumour-forming cells were destroyed faster than healthy cells when exposed to radium!! While their early medical work did contain mistakes, radiation really could shrink tumours, while applied directly slivers of radium could do the same. These techniques, in refined form, were the basis of Curie's career in therapeutic radiology and were closely related to mine in diagnostic radiology.
After 5 years as an isolated widow, Marie Curie’s relationship with her husband's former student, Paul Langevin, became public. Curie was derided in the press for breaking up Langevin's marriage. Although it nearly prevented her receiving her second Nobel Prize, Curie’s scientific work continued at the top level.
They also published 32 scientific papers, one announcing that diseased, tumour-forming cells were destroyed faster than healthy cells when exposed to radium!! While their early medical work did contain mistakes, radiation really could shrink tumours, while applied directly slivers of radium could do the same. These techniques, in refined form, were the basis of Curie's career in therapeutic radiology and were closely related to mine in diagnostic radiology.
In Nov 1903 the Royal Society of London gave the Curies its highest awards, the Davy Medal. A month later the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm announced that three French scientists, AH Becquerel and the Curies, were the joint recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1903. In 1904 Pierre travelled to Stockholm where he delivered their Nobel Prize lecture. In Dec 1904, their daughter Ève was born, just as Mme Curie gained her Doctor of Science degree.
The family team ended tragically in Apr 1906 when Pierre was hit by a heavy carriage and killed. The widow was soon asked to take over her late husband's post as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne. Honours poured in from scientific societies all over the world for the young widow and her gigantic task of radioactivity research. In 1908 Dr Curie edited the collected works of her late husband, and in 1910 she published her massive Traité de radioactivité.
Dr Curie had been the first woman to be granted her 1st Nobel Prize in 1903 in physics, and later became the first person to earn a second one. She received her 2nd Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in chemistry, for the discovery of radium and polonium and the isolation of radium. She provided science with a method for isolating and purifying radioactive isotopes. Marie became Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, a giant laboratory founded by Paris Uni and Institut Pasteur before the war.
WW1 car carrying X-ray technology
Photo credit. The Conversation
Disturbed at the quality of medical care for soldiers, Dr Curie invented and resourced a brilliant fleet of radiology cars to carry X-ray technology to wounded soldiers on WW1’s front line. The machines diagnosed injuries by X-raying wounded soldiers for bullets, shrapnel and fractures. After the war, she wrote and published her book La Radiologie et la guerre. In it she gave details of the scientific and human experiences gained for radiology during the war.
An important visitor to the Radium Institute was Mrs William Marie Meloney, editor of a New York magazine and a Curie-fan. Meloney organised a nationwide subscription in America that produced money needed to purchase a gram of radium. Dr Curie was invited to the USA with her daughters, to collect the precious gift. In the White House, Pres Warren Harding (1865–1923) made a presentation. On her second trip in 1929, Pres H Hoover presented her with the money donated by Americans, to buy radium for her laboratories.
In 1926 Marie’s daughter Irène married Frédéric Joliot, the most gifted assistant at the Radium Institute. In 1937 as a Collège de France professor, Frédéric studied chain reactions and controlled nuclear fission to generate energy. Irene and Frederick were awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of artificial radioactivity.
Today scientists, working in cancer treatment, archaeology and astrophysics, continue to build on her radiation work. Dr Curie worked into old age, completing her last book Radio-activité in 1934. She died in 1934 from aplastic anaemia, due to overexposure to radiation. Even sadder, her brilliant daughter Irene died from radiation leukemia in 1956.
12 comments:
Just as well Pierre was less sexist than the Nobel Academy in Stockholm. He was keen to work with a sharp female scientist, one as clever as he was.
When Pierre was nominated to receive the Nobel Prize alone, he refused to accept it until the Nobel Committee added her name as an equal recipient. The Nobel Prize had never been given to a woman in the couple of years before Marie Curie and it nearly wasn't awarded to her either.
Hello Hels and Dr. Joe, I too am a great admirer of Marie Curie. In addition to her immense contributions to science and medicine, she also has the distinction of adding to the language the useful and now basic metaphor of searching through a ton of pitchblende.
--Jim
Parnassus
nod and another thing. Einstein’s revolutionary theory was ignored as "rubbish Jewish science", while Marie Curie was accused of being a "so-called scientist who took her late husband's findings". Both these Outsiders found inspiration in their meetings and correspondence.
How often is it that when we hear about great lives there so regularly seems to be tragedy or great obstacles in those lives. Perhaps the resistance to these barriers is what helps them to overcome and raise above them to see further.
CLICK HERE for Bazza’s almost abhorrent Blog ‘To Discover Ice’
bazza
Good question! Part of the story is often surviving great obstacles that make the sufferer stronger, agreed. But so often great obstacles defeat people who weren't mainstream in the first place. These outsiders might have been people of the wrong gender, the wrong religion, the wrong colour or even the physically handicapped.
So Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Rosalind Franklin, Ada Lovelace and Vincent van Gogh were geniuses who died between 27-37 years of age. Stephen Hawkings, Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein were equally geniuses who survived and worked until their 70s and 80s!
The radiological car was a stroke of Curie genius. The x-ray machine and the photographic darkroom equipment could drive to the front lines where army surgeons could work on the wounded soldiers as soon as possible.
Power came from another added machine, an electrical generator.
H Hels - thanks for this ... the Curies were amazing - and so I've been grateful to learn more. Quite extraordinary ... and so many other inventions were able to come out of their findings ... as Joseph mentions amongst others - thank you - Hilary
Joseph
Marie Curie made a huge contribution to the health and survival rate of soldiers in WW1. But she was also brave... how many other middle aged scholars would drive towards the war front to help their nation?
Hilary
we assume that humanity always knew what it knows now. Even though the Curies, Roentgen and Becquerel were only working in the 1890s (my grandfather might have even remembered them), their science has been lost in the mist of history.
I think university students should do at least one unit on the History of Science.
Thanks for this . What a brain aandd whaat courage . Its a miracle she lived as long as she didi . The picture of her stashing radium into her luggage fro transport to Europe is aa bit mind bending !!
mem
I wonder when scientists understood the toxic quality of radium. Physics Today wrote that by the late 1920s major radiological societies in Europe and the US were growing concerned about the effects of radiation exposures. In 1929, alarmed by the MANY deaths among laboratory and industrial workers who handled radioactive materials, the societies joined forces to establish a Radium Protection Committee.
In fact in collaboration with the French National Academy of Medicine, Marie Curie had pushed for the use of lead screens and periodic blood tests for those working in the radium industry. Was it too late to save her own life?
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