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Marie Curie did not have an easy time following her passion for science. From her oppressed childhood to her poor days researching in a ramshackle lab, she was denied normal accommodations because she was a woman. But she was not deterred. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first person to win a second. She helped immensely in World War 1 and her research lead to entirely new fields of study. Marie’s discoveries changed the scientific understanding of physics and chemistry but in the end she suffered because of it.
Before she was a famous scientist, Marie Curie was a just a child, like anyone else. She was born as Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. Warsaw was no longer the capital of Poland, because at the time the country had been under the control of Russia, Prussia, and Austria.
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Warsaw in particular was under the oppressive rule of Russia. Because of this, Maria and her four siblings were brought up as patriotic Poles by their parents, who were teachers. The family struggled from this patriotism when Maria’s father lost his job due to his pro-Polish attitude. This shaped Maria’s childhood and education greatly.
Maria had to go to Russian schools, which were difficult to be at and didn’t even allow students to speak their native Polish. During this time, Maria suffered serious tragedies. Before age 11, Maria’s mother and one of her sisters died. Maria still managed to graduate high school at age 15 with high distinction.
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Since her father and grandfather were both science professors, Maria had an early interest in science which only grew as she did. But as a woman and oppressed Pole, it was difficult for her to get the right education. Her sister was in a similar situation, so the two found a solution.
After high school, Maria and her sister Bronya wanted to continue to college, but the University of Warsaw didn’t allow women to study there. So instead, they secretly attended a “floating university” that only met at night and in a different place each time, to avoid detection from the police.
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But this wasn’t going to get the sisters where they wanted in life, so they agreed that Maria would work to pay for Bronya to go to medical school in Paris. Then once Bronya had money, she would pay for Maria to go to school there, too. So, Maria found a job.
At age 17, Maria left home to go to a village outside of Warsaw and work as a governess for a factory owner. As governess, she privately taught his several children and illegally taught other Polish children in the village. On the side, she continued her own reading and learning of math, physics, and chemistry.
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In 1889 Maria returned to Warsaw and she fueled her growing passion by conducting experiments in a small laboratory owned by her cousin. She also secretly taught workers as part of a group of patriotic Polish youths. In the evenings, she studied chemistry at an illegal lab. But soon enough, she had enough money to move to Paris at age 23.
In 1891, Maria moved to Paris and started at the Sorbonne University as the now French-friendly Marie. Six floors up, she lived in a garret, which is a small attic room. It was freezing and she barely had anything to eat, but she was quite satisfied with her new independence.
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But finally, Marie could study as she wanted and not in the shadows as she did in Poland. She was behind, as she hadn’t gotten the level of education the French students had, but she made up for it by working tirelessly. “It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty,” wrote Marie Sklodowska.
After Marie graduated with Master’s degrees in both physics and math, The Society for the Encouragement of National Industry agreed to pay Marie to research magnetic properties of steels. But to do this, she needed to find a laboratory. A little luck came her way when a friend of hers introduced her to someone new.
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In 1894, a Polish physicist Marie knew took her on a little double date with his wife and the scientist Pierre Curie. Pierre and Marie connected over their mutual scientific interest and it turned out that he had a lab Marie could use. Throughout their relationship, they spent quite a lot of time in labs.
Well Pierre and Marie grew closer and closer, to the point of Pierre asking her to marry him. Marie hesitated though, because she still wanted to go back to Poland and continue pushing social projects there. She was still very much the proud Pole that she’d been raised to be.
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But in the end, she decided to marry him in July of 1895. It was a small civil ceremony and Marie wore a dark blue outfit that she later wore in the lab for years afterward. For their honeymoon, they toured France on bicycles, which they both loved to ride.
Two years later Marie finished her work on magnetism in steel and had her first daughter, Irène. She carefully took notes of Irène’s development just as she would with her laboratory experiments. And now, since her steel research was done, she decided to pursue a doctorate in science, which no woman had yet completed.
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However, as many mothers can attest, raising a child and working full time proved difficult. But neither Marie nor Pierre wanted Marie to give up her research, so Pierre’s father came to live with them to help take care of Irène. Now Marie turned to looking for a topic to pursue for her doctoral research.
Around this same time, people were making important discoveries in physics. In 1895, William Roentgen discovered X-rays, which can travel through wood and tissue, and in 1896 Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium gives off similar rays. While most people continued to research the X-rays, Marie decided to follow the mystery of uranium.
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She got a dingy little storeroom at the Paris Municipal School for a makeshift lab and began her studies. Using a “Curie electrometer” designed by her husband, she measured the amount of electrical changes the uranium rays made in the air. This led her to the discovery that the intensity of the rays only depended on the amount of uranium and nothing else.
At the time Marie was researching these rays, scientists thought that the atom was indivisible, meaning it was the smallest particle that existed. Atoms were what formed everything else. Now, we know that an atom’s nucleus is made of protons and neutrons, while electrons form its outer shells. The atom is not actually the smallest particle.
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Marie Curie’s research was important for scientists realizing this. Marie hypothesized that uranium’s rays were an atomic property, something specific to the uranium atom and its structure. This hypothesis contributed to the shift in understanding that atoms were not indivisible, but made up of smaller particles. Marie tested all the other known elements for rays.
Soon Marie discovered thorium was the only other known element that emitted rays like uranium. She coined the term “radioactivity” for the rays these elements were producing. But when she was studying a mineral called pitchblende, which is largely uranium but can contain up to 30 different elements, she found it gave off more radioactivity than its uranium could account for.
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Was there another radioactive element in the pitchblende that had never before been discovered? She thought so, and Pierre was so intrigued that he ditched his own research and joined her. “I had a passionate desire to verify this hypothesis as rapidly as possible,” wrote Marie Curie. She was driven to find answers.
Marie dove into her research, looking for the mysterious radioactive elements. She and Pierre used various chemical reactions, like pouring acid on the mineral, to separate the different elements from the pitchblende. Once it was in smaller sections, they followed the strongest radioactivity until they found two entirely new elements in 1898.
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The elements were in such small quantity that without their high level of radioactivity, they probably never would have been found. Marie named one polonium, after Poland, and the other radium, after the rays it produced. So what was causing these elements to be radioactive?
Certain elements, like radium and uranium, are radioactive because their atoms are unstable. The atoms are undergoing what’s called “radioactive decay” in which the particles that make up the atom are coming off or turning into other types. At the time, the Curies did not know what was making polonium and radium radioactive.
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Since an element is defined by the number of protons in its atom’s nucleus, radioactive decay can actually turn one element into a different one. For instance, uranium can decay and become thorium. This process gives off a lot of energy, which is the radioactivity that the Curies were measuring.
The radioactive decaying process happens over a certain amount of time that depends on the element. Generally, this is measured by an element’s “half-life” which is the average amount of time it would take for half the atoms in a sample to decay and become a different element. Half lives are specific to each radioactive element.
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Elemental half-lives can vary widely. For example, uranium-238’s half-life is about four billion years, while iodine-131’s half-life is eight days. Now, scientists use radioactive decay to figure out the age of minerals and other things on Earth. But in the Curie lab, polonium’s somewhat short half-life was working against them.
While they had announced the existence of the two new elements, the Curies had yet to actually isolate them from other elements. Because of this, not everyone believed their discovery. The Curies moved their lab out of the storeroom and into a “miserable old shed” as Marie called it. The shed didn’t even fully protect them from rain.
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It took many more years before they isolated pure radium, and Marie never did isolate polonium. Polonium’s half-life is 138 days, so the polonium was constantly disappearing right under her nose, before she could ever isolate it. Despite this, Marie and Pierre were thrust into the scientific spotlight for their discovery.
“One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights,” Marie wrote.
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Marie and Pierre’s work gained them a lot of attention. An entire industry formed around radium, which was being used for medical purposes and things like glow in the dark watches. Their quiet life was disrupted and now filled with rather unwanted attention. But despite it, Marie was happy that radium could help people.
Pierre soon proved that radium could damage living flesh, which counter-intuitively led to its use in the medical industry. Radium was used as a treatment for cancer, because it killed cancer cells. Today, radiation therapy is still used to treat cancer, but in a somewhat safer way than strapping bottles full of radium to your body.
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Today, the medicinal radiation can also damage nearby healthy cells, resulting in possible side effects like hair loss, vomiting, and skin issues. Of course, several years after people began using radiation to treat cancer, they discovered it can also cause cancer. But it was too late, radium was already being used for anything and everything.
Not only did people use radium to treat cancer, but they also began to use it for just about anything. A few years after Marie and Pierre discovered radium, other scientists discovered that natural hot springs were radioactive too. Since these springs were used as healing spas, people thought maybe the radioactivity was the thing doing the healing.
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So a business boomed around selling “Radon Water” and water coolers that added radon gas to your water. Soon enough, people manufactured other radioactive products, like uranium blankets. Some products had no real radiation, some had too little to actually hurt anyone, but plenty had seriously damaging amounts of radiation.
Nowadays, radiation is a scary word, but actually we are constantly exposed to “background radiation” because radioactive elements naturally occur in the environment. Some radiation comes from space and the atmosphere, but plenty comes from minerals in the ground. A dental X-ray produces less radiation than the background radiation we’re exposed to.
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Radiation kills cells in the body, depending on how much radiation and for how long the person is exposed. Symptoms of radiation poisoning are nausea and damage to organs, like bone marrow and the lymph nodes. Marie and Pierre were frequently ill throughout their lives, which was likely due to their constant exposure to radioactive elements.
In 1903, Marie became the first woman to do two things. She earned a doctorate degree as the first woman in France to do so. And, along with Pierre and Becquerel, she won the Nobel Prize for physics. They won the medal for the discovery of radioactivity and the further research on the rays.
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However, many people believed that Marie just helped out Pierre, as opposed to pioneering the experiments as she actually did. She wasn’t even initially nominated for the Prize, only a letter from Pierre changed that. A friend of Marie’s, the physicist Hertha Ayrton, said, “Errors are notoriously hard to kill, but an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.”
Actually, the Curies were too ill to attend the awards ceremony but it still dramatically changed their lives. The Sorbonne finally gave Pierre a professorship, although at first they didn’t even offer him money for a lab. Marie became the chief of laboratory, which was her first title and her first time having a university salary.
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Finally, the Curies were getting a little bit more respect for their research. However, it took two years for the lab to be finished, and the Curies did not get a lot of research done in the meantime. They both taught and were bombarded with publicity, distracting them heavily from work.
Unfortunately, Pierre never fully got back to research. Just as he was getting back to it, an accident happened. Disaster struck again in Marie’s life in 1906 when Pierre died from being run over by a horse-drawn wagon. Shortly after, The Faculty of Sciences of Paris offered Marie the professorship her husband had occupied.
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She became the first woman professor at that college. But while teaching, researching, and raising her two daughters, she made a new goal of creating the Radium Institute in honor of Pierre. Unfortunately, Pierre never lived to see the second prize Marie got, or else he probably would have gotten it too.
Marie made history again in 1911 when she became the first person to win a second Nobel Prize, which was in chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium. But not long before this, she had been denied membership to the French Academy of Sciences because she was a woman.
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She is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific disciplines. Currently, there are only three other people who have won two Nobel Prizes. But Marie’s accomplishments didn’t stop here. A few years later, certain events turned her life upside down, but she stepped up and did her part.
In 1914, Marie was distracted from her research again as World War 1 demanded the attention of, well, everyone. Marie first shuttled France’s single gram of radium to safety in Bordeaux, where the French government had moved to. The radium was very valuable, so they wanted to keep it safe.
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However, Marie herself went back to Paris. She decided to use her science expertise to help the French soldiers. Marie identified a key thing that the hospitals were missing and worked to solve the problem. She was also appointed to the Red Cross Radiology Service and given the title Director.
Marie may not have been a medical doctor, but she definitely helped give medical care during World War 1. Marie realized that the fairly new X-rays could save lives by visualizing injuries, which there certainly were a lot of. The new hospitals in Paris weren’t equipped to do X-rays, so Marie worked with volunteers to set up X-ray stations around the city.
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But these stations weren’t enough, because soldiers couldn’t always get to the hospitals fast enough. Marie asked wealthy people to donate their cars, which she then outfitted with the equipment to make them mobile X-ray stations. These cars were named “petites Curies.” However, Marie was not exactly trained on how to fully operate a petites Curie.
Marie intended to operate a petites Curie herself, so she learned to drive and operate X-ray equipment. She quickly taught herself anatomy and auto mechanics, to giver herself the best skills for running a petites Curie. Her 17-year-old daughter Irène joined her as an assistant, and together they worked hard through the war.
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However during their work, neither Marie nor Irène were properly shielded from the X-ray equipment they used on soldiers. Still, the two trained many other women at the Radium Institute to operate the radiology equipment. Later, Irène won a military medal for her medical work, but Marie did not.
Marie Curie did not stop helping the war effort with the X-ray machines. She went back and got her gram of radium and used it to make small vials of radon gas. She then sent these to doctors, who then used the radon gas to kill diseased tissue in wounded soldiers.
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And Marie didn’t stop at helping her adopted country with just science, she helped it financially, too. When the French government asked for citizens’ gold and silver, Marie offered up her two gold Nobel Prize medals but they were refused. Instead, Curie used her prize money to purchase war bonds.
In a few years, the war ended and Marie Curie had to go back to her life. She was invited to the US in 1921 by Missy Meloney, journalist and editor of the women’s magazine The Delineator. Missy had been fundraising for the past year or so, gaining $100,000 to buy Marie a gram of radium.
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The Curies had never patented their discoveries and so hadn’t made much money from them. Marie couldn’t really afford much radium to research on, so this gram was very useful to her. President Harding gave her the radium at the White House after Marie did a several week long tour of the US, chock full of very unwanted publicity.
About a decade after visiting the US, Marie Curie died in 1934 at age 66 from aplastic anemia. It’s a condition characterized by the body not producing enough new blood cells. This happens because of damaged bone marrow, which is the stuff in your bones that makes blood cells.
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One cause of aplastic anemia is exposure to too much radiation, which Marie almost certainly had throughout her research. She had been having medical problems for over ten years before this. Pierre had also been having medical issues when he was alive, likely from exposure to radiation. But even after dying, Marie Curie lived on in her legacy.
The Radium Institute lived long after Marie Curie, as it is now called the Curie Institute and it still stands in Paris. Scientists still do pioneering medical research at the Institute. Marie’s oldest daughter Irène worked there and even won a Nobel Prize with her husband for synthesizing radioactive elements.
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To this day, Marie’s legacy lives on in the numerous scientific studies and discoveries brought about because of radioactivity. Her legacy is even in her notebooks and cookbooks, which are still too radioactive to safely touch. They’re kept in lead cases and only handled when the person is wearing protective materials. Luckily, we know a lot more about radioactivity today.