Her notebooks are still too dangerous to touch. In France's Bibliothèque nationale, Marie Curie's laboratory notebooks are stored in lead-lined boxes, and researchers who wish to consult them must sign a liability waiver, because more than a century later the pages remain contaminated with radium. Few scientists have left evidence of their work quite so literally radioactive — and few careers began from a less promising position.
She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, in a Poland that did not exist on the map: her part of it was ruled by the Russian Empire, which restricted Polish education, and no university in Warsaw would admit women at all. So she studied in secret, at the clandestine, constantly relocating "Flying University", and made a pact with her sister Bronia: Maria would work as a governess to pay for Bronia's medical studies in Paris, and Bronia would then fund Maria's turn. In 1891 she finally arrived at the Sorbonne, living in a cold garret, sometimes fainting from hunger, and finished first in her physics degree. In 1894 she met Pierre Curie, a physicist already known for his work on crystals and magnetism. He courted her partly by sending her a copy of one of his physics papers. They married the next year, and she became Marie Curie.
A shed full of pitchblende
In 1896 Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts spontaneously emitted mysterious rays. Casting around for a doctoral topic, Marie chose these little-studied rays — and quickly made a profound discovery: the radiation depended only on the amount of uranium present, not on its chemical form. Emission, she reasoned, must be a property of the atom itself. She coined the word for it: radioactivity. Then she noticed that pitchblende, a uranium ore, was more radioactive than its uranium content could explain. Something unknown, and fiercely active, was hiding in the rock.
Finding it meant labour on an industrial scale performed in a leaky, converted shed. Pierre abandoned his own research to join her, and together they stirred cauldrons of boiling ore, processing tonnes of pitchblende residue to chase ever-more-concentrated traces. In July 1898 they announced a new element, which Marie named polonium — a deliberate political act, planting her erased homeland's name in the periodic table. In December came a second: radium, whose salts glowed faintly in the dark. Marie ultimately isolated a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride from roughly a tonne of ore.
In 1903 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded half to Becquerel and half to Pierre and Marie Curie for the discovery of radioactivity — but only after a correction of history's course. The nominating letters had initially put forward Becquerel and Pierre alone; tipped off by a sympathetic Swedish mathematician, Pierre insisted that Marie's name be included. She became the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize.
Triumph and scandal
Then came catastrophe. In April 1906, Pierre slipped crossing a rain-slicked Paris street and was killed instantly under the wheel of a heavy horse-drawn cart. The Sorbonne offered his professorship to his widow, making Marie the university's first woman professor. She began her first lecture at the precise point in the syllabus where Pierre's last had ended.
In 1911 the Nobel committee honoured her again — this time in Chemistry, for the discovery of polonium and radium and the isolation of radium. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Yet the award arrived amid a firestorm: French newspapers had exposed her affair with the married physicist Paul Langevin, and the ensuing scandal — laced with xenophobia toward the "foreign woman" — grew so ugly that a Nobel official suggested she stay away from the ceremony. Her reply was steel: the prize was for her science, not her private life. She went to Stockholm and collected it. That same year, the French Academy of Sciences had rejected her membership; she never applied again.
When the First World War came, she converted her prestige into practicality, developing mobile X-ray vans — nicknamed petites Curies — and driving to the front herself, with her teenage daughter Irène alongside, to help locate shrapnel and fractures in wounded soldiers. The dynasty continued: Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for synthesising new radioactive elements — announced, poignantly, the year after Marie's death. Marie died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by her decades of radiation exposure, from lab work and wartime X-rays alike. In 1995 her remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris, making her the first woman honoured there on her own merits — interred, like her notebooks, in a lining of lead.
Quiz nuggets
- Marie Curie is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences: Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911).
- She named polonium after Poland, her homeland, then partitioned off the map under Russian rule.
- She coined the word "radioactivity" and, with Pierre, discovered both polonium and radium in 1898.
- Her lab notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes in Paris.
- In 1995 she became the first woman interred in the Panthéon on her own merits.