B1-36 · Marie Curie: A Life for Science

Marie Curie: A Life for Science

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person ever to win two. She discovered two new chemical elements. And she did it at a time when many people believed that women shouldn't study science at all.

A secret university. Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867. At that time, Poland was controlled by Russia, and women were not allowed to study at the university. Maria loved learning, so she joined the "Flying University", a secret school that moved from house to house. She and her sister Bronisława made a deal: Maria would work as a governess and pay for Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, and later Bronisława would help Maria.

Paris. In 1891, at the age of twenty-four, Maria finally moved to Paris and started studying at the Sorbonne, where she changed her name to Marie. She was so poor that she sometimes fainted from hunger, but she finished first in her class in physics and second in mathematics. In 1894, she met Pierre Curie, a scientist who shared her passion for research. They married a year later.

Radium and polonium. Marie decided to study the strange rays that came from uranium. She called this effect "radioactivity". Working in a cold shed with Pierre, she processed tons of rock and discovered two new elements in 1898. She named the first one polonium, after her home country, and the second one radium. In 1903, Marie, Pierre and Henri Becquerel received the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Tragedy and a second prize. In 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident in Paris. Marie was devastated, but she continued their work. She took over Pierre's job and became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry. She is still the only person who has won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

War and the end. During the First World War, Marie developed mobile X-ray cars, and she drove some of them to the front herself. They helped doctors to find bullets in the bodies of about a million wounded soldiers. Nobody knew then how dangerous radiation was. Marie often carried tubes of radium in her pocket, and she died of a blood disease in 1934. Her notebooks are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead boxes, and visitors who want to read them must sign a form and wear protective clothing.