Curie Wins Second Nobel: A Legacy of Discovery

Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on November 7, 1911, becoming the first person to win the award in two different scientific disciplines. The prize recognized her discovery of radium and polonium and her work isolating pure radium metal, achievements that required processing tons of pitchblende ore in a leaking shed with no ventilation. Her first Nobel, shared with husband Pierre and physicist Henri Becquerel in 1903 for research on radioactivity, had nearly been denied to her. The original nomination included only Pierre and Becquerel. Swedish mathematician Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler warned Pierre, who insisted Marie's name be added. The episode revealed how readily the scientific establishment erased women's contributions. By 1911, Curie was working under extraordinary pressure. Pierre had been killed in 1906 when a horse-drawn cart crushed his skull on a rain-slicked Paris street. She took over his professorship at the Sorbonne, becoming the university's first female professor. A tabloid campaign erupted around her relationship with physicist Paul Langevin, a married former student of Pierre's. French newspapers published stolen letters and portrayed Curie as a foreign home-wrecker. The Nobel committee reportedly considered asking her not to attend the ceremony; she went anyway. The radium she isolated transformed medicine, enabling targeted radiation therapy for cancer. The same element was killing her. Decades of handling radioactive materials without protection caused aplastic anemia, which took her life in 1934. Her laboratory notebooks remain so contaminated that they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, and visitors must sign a liability waiver to view them. Her body was reinterred in the Pantheon in 1995, the first woman honored there for her own achievements.