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 Marie Curie is perhaps the most famous woman in science. She is famous for her exciting discoveries and for how hard she worked when everything was against her. In 1866, a baby girl was born in Warsaw, Poland. She was called Marja Sklodowska and would later become the great scientist known as Marie Curie. Her parents were both teachers and Marja had three sisters and a brother. She was often top of her class in school and she loved learning. When Marja was 10 years old her mother died. Marja was very upset but still continued with her studies.  At that time, Poland was controlled by Russia. Two laws that Polish people had to obey were that all lessons were taught in Russian and that girls weren’t allowed to go to college. Marja desperately wanted to carry on studying in another country, but her father did not have enough money. So it was decided that Marja would work to support her sister, Bronya whilst she was studying in Paris until she finished when Bronya would then support Marja.  Finally when she was 24, Marja went to study at the Sorbonne, a famous university in Paris, where she studied physics and maths. To save herself a long journey from her sister’s house, she rented an attic near to the university. She was so poor that often she had to choose between buying food and buying fuel to keep her warm. Without fuel, the attic was so cold so she would put on all the clothes she owned to go to bed. Whilst at the Sorbonne, Marja (a Polish name) changed her name to the French ‘Marie’. She quickly received her degrees in both subjects. She stayed in Paris and started researching magnetism…
Pierre and Marie married and she changed her name again. They were given money as a wedding present which they used to buy a bicycle each! Marie was interested in an element called uranium and the radiation that came from it. She thought that the radiation was coming from an unknown ingredient inside the uranium. One day the Curies visited their shed and saw a strange blue glow, made by radioactivity from the element they called ‘radium’ – a totally unknown atom. They also discovered another radioactive element called ‘polonium’ which they named after Poland.  People began to realise that the Curie’s work was very important, and in 1903, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for physics.  Both Marie and Pierre worked hard, but they were often unwell. Marie and Pierre were handling lethal radioactive material with their bare hands.Neither of them realised that the radiation they worked with was extremely dangerous. Pierre even carried radium in a test tube in his pocket. The radioactive rays burnt embarrassing holes in his trousers and made his legs sore. Pierre died in a street accident in 1906, but Marie carried on working. While she was doing this work, Marie discovered another ray, which she called an X-ray. She found that X-rays could be used to make pictures of the inside of the human body, and that they could also kill cancer cells. In 1911, Marie was awarded a second Nobel Prize. She also became the first female professor at the Sorbonne. Marie set up the Radium Institute in Paris, a laboratory in Poland and several other X-ray laboratories. She helped to train women to use the X-ray machines so that they could help doctors all over Europe. 
By the 1920s, companies were cashing in on the strange new chemical. They made radium face powder and beauty creams, radium watch dials which glowed in the dark and glow in the dark false teeth. The products were a disaster because the radioactivity in radium made it really harmful.In 1934, Marie died from leukaemia, which was probably caused by the radioactivity that she had been working with for so long.  In her honour, the Radium Institute was renamed the Curie Institute. Scientists still work there today, but with much stricter safety rules! Marie’s notebooks have to be locked away because they are so contaminated by radioactive chemicals that they are too dangerous to touch! |
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