Marie Curie Dies: Radiation Pioneer Claimed by Her Discovery

Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, France, of aplastic anemia caused by decades of radiation exposure. She had spent years handling radioactive materials with no protective equipment, carrying test tubes of radium in her coat pockets and storing samples on her nightstand because she enjoyed watching the blue-green glow in the dark. Nobody understood the danger. She had no idea the substances she had discovered were killing her. Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867, she moved to Paris at twenty-four to study physics at the Sorbonne, sleeping in an unheated attic and sometimes fainting from hunger during lectures. She married Pierre Curie in 1895, and together they isolated two new elements: polonium, which she named after her native Poland, and radium. She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, sharing it with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her work on radium, becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a distinction no one has matched since. Pierre was killed in 1906 when he was run over by a horse-drawn cart on a Paris street. Marie took over his teaching position at the Sorbonne, becoming the university's first female professor. Her laboratory notebooks, personal papers, and even her cookbook remain so contaminated with radium-226, which has a half-life of 1,600 years, that they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Visitors must sign a liability waiver and wear protective clothing to view them.