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Marie Curie
b. 11-7-1867; Warsaw, Poland
d. 7-4-1934; Paris, France
Poster Text: The pioneering reasearch of physicist and chemist Marie Curie contributed to some of the most important new fields of study in science, from modern physics to the treatment of cancer. Madame Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the most famous honor in science. Eventually she won two Nobels.
On November 7, 1867, Marya Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, Poland. Her father, a professor of mathematics and physics, sparked her interest in science. After graduating from high school, she began working as a tutor and governess to earn money so she could fulfill her dream of attending the Sorbonne, a university in Paris.
In 1891 she moved to France and began studying at the Sorbonne, registering as Marie, the French version of her name. In just two years she earned a degree in physics, and went on to earn a second degree in mathematics in another year. She met Pierre Curie, a well-known and respected physicist, in 1894, and they married the following year.
Another French physicist, Antoine Bacquerel had recently discovered that a metal called uranium let off rays of energy that no one understood. Madame Curie decided to study these rays. Her research soon revealed that this energy which she named “radioactivity,” came from within the atom itself. An atom is the smallest particle of a simple chemical substance called an element. In 1898 her husband joind her in this research, and working with tons of uranium ore, they separated out two new radioactive elements. They named these elements polonium, after Madame Curie's native Poland, and radium.
In 1906, Pierre Curie was hit by a truck and killed. Madame Curie took up his professorship at the Sorbonne becoming the first woman ever to teach there. She carried on her research of radium, and in 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for separating out radium and studying its chemical properties. Madame Curie helped found the Radium Institute in Paris in 1914 and served as its first director. This center, where doctors use radiation to treat cancer and researchers study chemistry and biology, was later renamed the Curie Institute.
Radium can be used to take an x-ray. After the outbreak of World War I, Madame Curie helped set up x-ray machines in vans that could be taken out to help doctors treat the wounded.
Although no one knew it at that time, radiation can make people very ill. Both Pierre and Marie Curie sufferd bad health effects from what is now known as radiation sickness. On July 4, 1934, Marie Curie died of leukemia, most likely brought on by exposure to radiation during her work. Her daugher, Irene Joliot-Curie, and her son-in-law continued research in the same field, and the two of them were awared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for producing new radioactive elements.
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