Famous women in history: Marie Curie
Maria Salomea Sklodowska-Curie, known as Marie Curie, was born on November 7th, 1867. Marie was a Polish and French chemist and physicist who had conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was also the first woman to have won a Nobel Prize, the first person to have won a Nobel Prize twice, and she was the only person to have won a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. Going on, her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner to her first Nobel prize, making them the first married couple to have won the Nobel Prize thus launching what is called the Curie family legacy of having won five Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor for the University of Paris, in 1906.
Let's take a look at her past, Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, which was in what was known then as the Kingdom of Poland, and it was part of the Russian Empire. She had studied at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University and she began her scientific training in Warsaw. At age 24, in 1891, she followed after her older sister Bronislawa to study in Paris, where she earned all her higher degrees and began conducting her scientific work. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, a french physicist. In 1903 she won a Nobel Prize in Physics, to which she shared with Pierre and a fellow physicist by the name of Henri Becquerel for their involvement in developing the theory of radioactivity (a term she coined). Three years later, Marie had unfortunately suffered the loss of her husband from a Paris street accident. Then in 1911 she won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium. She had discovered these using techniques she had invented for isolating radioactive isotopes. She directed the world’s first conducted studies of the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. In 1920 she founded the Curie institute in Paris and in 1932 she founded the Curie institute in Warsaw, which both remain as major medical research centers. During the time of World War 1 she had developed mobile radiography units to provide x-ray services to field hospitals.
For more personal information, while she lived in France she kept in touch with her Polish side. She taught her daughters the Polish language and also took them to Poland for visits. She even named the first chemical element she discovered after her country, Polonium. She then died in 1934, at age 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, France from aplastic anemia that was likely from exposure to radiation from her scientific research and her work at field hospitals during World War 1.
In addition to her Nobel Prize winnings she also received numerous other honors and tributes; in 1995 she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Paris Pantheon, and Poland declared 2011 as the year of Marie Curie during the international year of Chemistry. She is also the subject of numerous biographical works.
