![]() Curie’s work helped to revolutionize our understanding of the atom and its potential. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in different sciences. Marie Curie was a physicist and chemist who conducted groundbreaking research on radioactivity. Marie Curie died in 1934 at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Haute-Savoie, France, from aplastic anemia brought on by her long-term exposure to radiation.įrequently asked questions about Marie Curie ![]() During World War I, she established the military field radiological centres. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today. Under her direction, the world’s first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms with radiation. Marie Curie’s achievements included the development of the theory of radioactivity (a term coined by her), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. “I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.” – Marie Curie The Curies conducted their famous joint research on the radiation phenomena discovered by Henri Becquerel. She married Pierre Curie, a French physicist, with whom she would have two daughters: Irene Joliot-Curie and Eve Curie. She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris.īorn Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, she studied at Warsaw’s clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. The information contained in this biography was last updated on December 4, 2017.Marie Curie was a Polish-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. Mother and daughter both eventually died of leukemia induced by their long exposure to radioactive materials. Her elder daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, became a Nobel Prize–winning chemist, also with her husband, Frédéric Joliot. In the midst of her busy scientific career Curie raised two daughters-in part with the help of her father-in-law. ![]() ![]() During the war Curie organized a field system of portable X-ray machines to help in treating wounded French soldiers. Just before World War I radium institutes were established for her in France and in Poland to pursue the scientific and medical uses of radioactivity. After Pierre’s death in 1906, when he was accidentally struck by a horse-drawn wagon, Marie achieved their objective of producing a pure specimen of radium. In 1898, after laboriously isolating various substances by successive chemical reactions and crystallizations of the products, which they then tested for their ability to ionize air, the Curies announced the discovery of polonium, and then of radium salts weighing about 0.1 gram that had been derived from tons of uranium ore. Curie soon convinced her husband to join in the endeavor of isolating the “radioactive” substance-a word she coined. For her thesis she chose to work in a field just opened up by Wilhelm Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays and Becquerel’s observation of the mysterious power of samples of uranium salts to expose photographic film. Already entranced with chemistry, she took advanced scientific degrees at the Sorbonne, where she met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist who had achieved fame for his work on the piezoelectric effect. The daughter of impoverished Polish schoolteachers, Marie Sklodowska worked as a governess in Poland to support her older sister in Paris, whom she eventually joined there. Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania From Poland to Paris and the Radioactive
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