1867 - 1934
Overview:
Marie Curie discovered one of the most amazing phenomena of the natural world. Radiation. And although her discovery helped aid her death and those around her, her research will never be forgotten. She is the mother of science!
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Marie Curie
Her exploration into many forms of radiation changed the direction of science.
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Country:
France
Type
of hero: Trailblazer
Attributes:
Female Scientist
Biography:
Warsaw, Poland. From a very early age, she had an attraction to all thing scientific, especially physics related activities. Her parents who were both teachers supported this interest, even though under Russian rule, girls were forbidden to enter into higher learning.
When Marie was ten, one of her three sisters, Sophie died of Typhoid Fever. Her mother also died that same year of Tuberculosis, which she contracted, when Marie was only one year old. Despite the grief in losing her sister and mother, Her two remaining sisters, brother and father continued on with life, with Marie concentrating very hard on her studies.
In spite of the rules of her country, Marie and her two sisters attended secret, underground institutions for learning. She went on to study in Paris and finished her first class in Physics in only two years. After that she studied further mathematics, which qualified her to be a better scientist.
It was after all of this that Marie was offered her first job. She had to study the magnetism on steel rods. Pierre Curie, who taught Physics at the University of Paris, shared the laboratory she was working in. Between this pair, a romance spurred, and Pierre pursued Marie when she returned back to Poland, but she returned to France to obtain her doctorate.
The two of them studied together very closely and as a result of this they were married on July 25th, 1895. She worked towards her doctorate for ten years and in that time discovered Polonium and the new element Radium. This was the discovery of radiation, and she conducted much research after her discovery.
After four more years of research into radium, she received her doctorate and the Nobel Prize for Physics. Her and Pierre received it together as they had both worked on the new substance radium. They discovered that using the rays produced by radium, it was possible to see through into the interior of a living thing and also to kill cells. Radium is still used today to kill of cancerous cells in humans.
The two of them were working so hard that they failed to notice how sick they were getting due to the overexposure to radiation. In 1906, Pierre died after being run over by a horse drawn carriage in Paris and Marie contracted Tuberculosis. Despite her heartbreak and being left alone with their two children, Irene aged nine and Eva aged two, she continued to work with her discovery, and became the first woman to teach at Sorbonne.
In 1911 Marie received her second Nobel prize but this time for Chemistry, as she had discovered a way to isolate radium and discover its chemical properties. After this she went on to open two institutes for the study of radium and at the beginning of World War II she funded x-ray facilities at hospitals and trained women to use them.
Unfortunately Marie failed to notice her further sliding health and didn’t make the connection with the health risk that she had been playing with for so many years. Even though her husband and her assistant had been very ill and died, she went on working right up until she died in 1934 of what was thought to have been leukemia. The Radium Institutes in Poland and France were renamed the Curie Institutes in her honour and still exist today, but Marie’s diaries and report books remain locked up as they are too radioactive to handle!
Citations
& References:
Links:
http://zen.sunderland.ac.uk/~hb5hco/marie.htm
http://step.sdsc.edu/projects95/chem.in.history/essays/curiemarie.html
http://www.mbnet.mb.ca/~mmci/papers/lisa/curie2.html
http://www.jcware.com/tributes/Science/Curie/index.htm
References
Jones, B., & Dixon, M.,(1989) The Macmillian Dictionary of Biography- Third Edition
Macmillian Australia.
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