Who was Marie Curie?
Marie (Sklodowska) Curie was born in Warsaw in 1867. In 1891, she moved to Paris where she got degrees in physics and mathematical sciences. She married the French scientist Pierre Curie in 1894. They worked together on radioactivity and developed methods for the isolation of radium and its therapeutic uses. Among many other awards, she received a Nobel Prize in physics with her husband and Becquerel for their work on spontaneous radiation in 1903 and one in chemistry for her work on the radioactivity of polonium and radium in 1911. During World War I, she was personally involved with the creation and use of mobile radiography units (known as “Little Curies”) to locate shrapnel or bullets in wounded soldiers for the preparation of surgical intervention. She died in France in 1934 from a blood disease resulting from the overexposure to radiation during her research. To date, she remains the only woman to have received two Nobel prizes and to be buried in the French Panthéon of great men
Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and the only person to win the Nobel Prize twice. Working together, Marie and her husband Pierre, discovered the chemical elements radium and polonium. Born on November 7 1867 in Warsaw, Marie Curie received her early scientific training from her father who was a physics teacher. She then went on to study at Cracow and 1891 she went to the Sorbonne in Paris obtaining her degree two years later. To meet the expenses for fees, books and living Marie Curie had to work caring for the laboratories. While at the university she met Pierre Curie who was professor of physics and they eventually married in 1895. WHAT DID MARIE CURIE ACHIEVE? Marie Curie was interested in recent discoveries in the field of radiation and began studying uranium radiations. Using techniques devised by her husband she measured the radiations in pitchblende. Pitchblende is an ore containing uranium. Marie Curie identified there were radiations from the ore more ra
Marie Curie, a truly remarkable woman whose ground-breaking research into radioactivity completely revolutionised our understanding of cancer and still forms the basis of modern cancer treatment. Marie Curie (born 1869, died 1934) was a Polish physicist and chemist who spent most of her working life in France. She was a brilliant scientist and one of the first people to experiment with radioactivity. She was the first person to win two Nobel prizes and also the first to win them for two entirely different fields. At the time it was extremely unusual for a woman to be so involved in advanced physics research and even more unusual for her to win such respect and acclaim for her work. Even today, she remains the only woman to have won two Nobel prizes. Marie Curie died in 1934 from ‘aplastic anemia’ which was almost certainly caused by the years of expsoure to radiation she had experienced in her work. At the time the dangers of radiation were not known. To find out more about Marie Curie
