Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less ...
Marie Skłodowska Curie, born 152 years ago today, 7th November 1867
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, is the only woman to win the Nobel prize twice, and is the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. She was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris
She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and physicist Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Her achievements included the development of the theory of radioactivity (a term she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms using radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw, which remain major centres of medical research today.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Curie was forced to put her research and the opening of her new Radium institute on hold due to the threat of a possible German occupation of Paris, she set about using her expertise in the field of radioactivity in order to aid the French war effort.
Over the course of the next four years, Curie helped equip and operate more than twenty ambulances (known as “Little Curies”) and hundreds of field hospitals with primitive x-ray machines so as to assist surgeons with the location and removal of shrapnel and bullets from the bodies of wounded soldiers. Not only did she personally instruct and supervise young women in the operation of the equipment, but she even drove and operated one such ambulance herself, despite the danger of venturing too close to the fighting on the front lines.
Awards that she received include:
Nobel Prize in Physics (1903, with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel)
Davy Medal (1903, with Pierre)
Matteucci Medal (1904, with Pierre)
Actonian Prize (1907)
Elliott Cresson Medal (1909)
Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911)
Franklin Medal of the American Philosophical Society (1921)
While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie, who used both surnames, never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland. She named the first chemical element she discovered polonium, after her native country.
Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at a sanatorium in Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France, of aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during World War I. At no point did she consider the possibility that her work was the cause of her pain and eventual death. In fact, all of her laboratory notes and many personal belongings are still so radioactive today that they cannot safely be viewed or studied.
These are my colourised versions of black, and white pictures taken in 1925 inside her converted shed/laboratory, and a portrait taken by Henri Manuel in 1920
Restoring Your Past … Website
Restoring Your Past … on Facebook
