Marie Curie Biography

Male: One of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century Polish born Marie Curie is the only person to win Nobel Prizes for two different fields of Science. Aged only 18, she went to work as a governess to earn money to help her sister Bronisława studying medicine in France. A few years later Bronisława returned the favor and funded Marie’s study at the Sorbonne. After topping her Masters degree in Physics course, Marie was introduced to French scientist Pierre Curie. In Pierre she found her research soul mate and the two married in 1895. Pierre shared Marie’s love of experimentation and discovery and they personal and professional partnership flourished. Marie’s investigation of Uranium Rays yielded the ground breaking hypothesis that the rays could be an atomic property of Uranium, leading to a Nobel Prize in Physics leading to another prize in Physics. Together the Curie’s discovered two new elements on the periodic table Polonium named from Marie’s native country and radium. In 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident and Curie was left with two young daughters to support. However, she spurned an offer of the state pension from the French government saying she would earn a living through her such. Although it was becoming apparent that radium had a potential and lucrative commercial future in medicine both Marie and Pierre were opposed to profiting from scientific research and believed all their work should be freely available. With the help of philanthropists and government funding Marie’s scrape together the fund was to build the Radium Institute to further her research as she continued to teach in schools and universities. An ill-fated affair with Marie’s scientist Paul Langevin led to a medium blood bath with the press to terrorize Marie and her daughters and worrying Marie with her state of the nervous collapsed. The desperate news that have soldiers brought Marie into seclusion during the first World War and she set up France’s first mobile and military radiology centers providing radium gas for x-rays with a single drum of Uranium she possessed. Her 18-year-old daughter Irene trained was a radiological assistant and the company took her to the battle of front. After the war Marie traveled to America to raise funds for her Institute and inspect her Radium refining plant in Pittsburg that provided her next supply of radium. She was faded by President Warren Harding and received huge support from the press and public. In 1931, the Radiological Society in Paris presented her with the gold medal for her work in Science. Three years later Marie died from illnesses connected with her constant exposure to radiation as much for her early work was undertaken before its damaging effects were unknown. She was buried with husband Pierre in the French Cemetery. But 60 years later the remains were dug up and re-interred with honors in the Pantheon in Paris. Their daughter Irene won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for discovering a way of creating artificial radiation and Pierre on the side, her daughter also became prominent scientists. Marie Curie’s Warsaw birthplace is now a museum documenting her life, schools, institutes and universities around the world have been named in her honor celebrating the scientist who put learning and discovery above everything. As Marie once said, “You must not forget that when Radium was discovered no one knew it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science and this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.”