Marie Curie Born: Pioneer of Radioactivity Arrives

Marie Curie was born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, when Poland had been erased from the map of Europe, partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria since 1795. Her father taught mathematics and physics in schools where the Russian authorities had banned the teaching of Polish history and language. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Maria was ten. Women could not attend university in Russian-controlled Poland. She enrolled in the "Flying University," an illegal network of classrooms that moved locations to evade the authorities. She worked as a governess for years, saving money to finance her older sister's medical studies in Paris on the understanding that her sister would then help fund hers. She arrived in Paris in 1891, enrolled at the Sorbonne under the name "Marie," and lived in an unheated garret in the Latin Quarter. She sometimes fainted from hunger but graduated first in her physics class in 1893 and second in mathematics the following year. She married Pierre Curie in 1895. Together they investigated Becquerel's discovery that uranium salts emitted radiation. Marie coined the term "radioactivity." Working in a leaking shed without proper ventilation or protective equipment, they processed tons of pitchblende ore to isolate two new elements: polonium, named after her partitioned homeland, and radium. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn wagon on a Paris street in 1906. Marie took over his chair at the Sorbonne, becoming the first female professor in the university's history. She won a second Nobel Prize in 1911, in Chemistry, for isolating pure radium, becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. During World War I, she developed mobile X-ray units that could be driven to the front lines. She drove one herself. She trained 150 women to operate them. She died on July 4, 1934, of aplastic anemia caused by decades of radiation exposure. Her laboratory notebooks remain radioactive and are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliotheque nationale de France.