Marie Curie Born: Two Nobel Prizes Await

Maria Sklodowska was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, when Poland did not officially exist. It had been partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria since 1795. Her father was a physics teacher. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Maria was ten. Women were not permitted to attend university in Russian-controlled Poland, so she enrolled in secret at the "Flying University," a network of underground classrooms that moved locations to evade the authorities. She saved money for years working as a governess, then moved to Paris in 1891 to study physics at the Sorbonne. She lived in an unheated attic apartment and sometimes fainted from hunger. She graduated first in her physics class in 1893 and earned a second degree in mathematics the following year. She married Pierre Curie in 1895. Together they began investigating a phenomenon that Henri Becquerel had discovered: uranium salts emitting radiation spontaneously. Marie named this property "radioactivity." She and Pierre discovered two new elements: polonium, named after her occupied homeland, and radium, which they extracted from tons of pitchblende ore in a leaking shed. The work was physically grueling and dangerous; they handled radioactive material with no protection. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize when she shared the 1903 Prize in Physics with Pierre and Becquerel. Pierre was killed in a Paris street accident in 1906, run over by a horse-drawn wagon. Marie took over his teaching position at the Sorbonne, becoming the university's first female professor. She won a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry, for isolating pure radium. No one else had won two Nobel Prizes in different sciences at that point, and only Linus Pauling would later match her. During World War I, she developed mobile X-ray units, called "petites Curies," that could be driven to field hospitals. She trained 150 women to operate them and drove one herself, near the front lines, diagnosing shrapnel injuries. She died on July 4, 1934, of aplastic anemia almost certainly caused by decades of radiation exposure. Her notebooks remain radioactive and are stored in lead-lined boxes.