Science in Poland - Maria Sklodowska-Curie
Maria Sklodowska-Curie
Deutsch Version
Maria (Marie Fr.) Sklodowska-Curie (born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 7, 1867) was one of the first woman scientists to win worldwide fame, and indeed, one of the great scientists of this century. She had degrees in mathematics and physics. Winner of two Nobel Prizes, for Physics in 1903 and for Chemistry in 1911, she performed pioneering studies with radium and polonium and contributed profoundly to the understanding of radioactivity.
Perhaps the most famous of all women scientists, Maria Sklodowska-Curie is notable for her many firsts:
She was the first to use the term radioactivity for this phenomenon.
She was the first woman in Europe to receive her doctorate of science.
In 1903, she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics. The award, jointly awarded to Curie, her husband Pierre, and Henri Becquerel, was for the discovery of radioactivity.
She was also the first female lecturer, professor and head of Laboratory at the Sorbonne University in Paris (1906).
In 1911, she won an unprecedented second Nobel Prize (this time in chemistry) for her discovery and isolation of pure radium and radium components. She was the first person ever to receive two Nobel Prizes.
She was the first mother-Nobel Prize Laureate of daughter-Nobel Prize Laureate. Her oldest daughter Irene Joliot-Curie also won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1935).
She is the first woman which has been laid to rest under the famous dome of the Pantheon in Paris for her own merits.
She received 15 gold medals, 19 degrees, and other honors.
A truly remarkable figure
in the history of science !
Maria Sklodowska-Curie
became the first Pole
to receive a Nobel Prize.
Maria Sklodowska was born as the fifth and youngest  child of Bronislawa Boguska, a pianist, singer, and teacher, and  Wladyslaw Sklodowski, a professor of mathematics and physics. When she was little and living in Poland, her nickname was Manya. From childhood she was remarkable for her prodigious memory,  and at the age of 16 she won a gold medal on completion of her  secondary education at the Russian lycée. Because her  father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings  through bad investment, she had to take work as a teacher and,  at the same time, took part clandestinely in the nationalist  "free university," reading in Polish to women workers. At the  age of 18 she took a post as governess, where she suffered an  unhappy love affair. From her earnings she was able to finance  her sister Bronia's medical studies in Paris, on the understanding  that Bronia would in turn later help her to get an education.
In 1891 Maria Sklodowska went to Paris and began to  follow the lectures of Paul Appel, Gabriel Lippmann, and Edmond  Bouty at the Sorbonne. There she met physicists who were already  well known--Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton.  Sklodowska worked far into the night in her students'-quarter  garret and virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. She  came first in the licence of physical sciences in 1893.  She began to work in Lippmann's research laboratory and in 1894  was placed second in the licence of mathematical sciences.  It was in the spring of this year that she met Pierre Curie.
Maria Sklodowska is daughter of a Polish freethinker but reared by a Catholic mother. She  abandoned the Church before she was 20 and her marriage with Pierre Curie was a purely civil  ceremony because she says in her memoir of him, Pierre belonged to no religion and I did not  practice any.
Their marriage (July 25, 1895) marked the start of a partnership  that was soon to achieve results of world significance, in particular  the discovery of polonium (so called by Maria in honour of Poland)  in the summer of 1898, and that of  radium a few months later. Following Henri Becquerel's discovery  (1896) of a new phenomenon (which she later called "radioactivity"),  Maria Curie, looking for a subject for a thesis, decided to  find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found  in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium  at the same time as G.C. Schmidt did.
Turning to minerals, her attention was drawn to  pitchblende, a mineral whose activity, superior to that of pure  uranium, could only be explained by the presence in the ore  of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity.  Pierre Curie then joined her in the work that she had undertaken  to resolve this problem and that led to the discovery of the  new elements, polonium and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted  himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations,  Maria Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic  state--achieved with the help of the chemist A. Debierne, one  of Pierre Curie's pupils. On the results of this research Maria  Curie received her doctorate of science in June 1903 and, with  Pierre, was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Also  in 1903 they shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics  for the discovery of radioactivity.
The birth of her two daughters, Irene and Eve,  in 1897 and 1904 did not interrupt Maria's intensive scientific  work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the École  Normale Supérieure for girls in Sévres (1900)  and introduced there a method of teaching based on experimental  demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant  in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.
The sudden death of Pierre Curie (April 19, 1906) was a bitter  blow to Maria Curie, but it was also a decisive turning point  in her career: henceforth she was to devote all her energy to  completing alone the scientific work that they had undertaken.  On May 13, 1906, she was appointed to the professorship that  had been left vacant on her husband's death; she was the first  woman to teach in the Sorbonne. In 1908 she became titular professor,  and in 1910 her fundamental treatise on radioactivity was published.  In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, for the  isolation of pure radium. In 1914 she saw the completion of  the building of the laboratories of the Radium Institute (Institut  du Radium) at the University of Paris.
Throughout World War I, Maria Curie, with the help of her daughter  Irène, devoted herself to the development of the use  of X-radiography. In 1918 the Radium Institute, the staff of  which Irène had joined, began to operate in earnest,  and it was to become a universal centre for nuclear physics  and chemistry. Maria Curie, now at the highest point of her  fame, and, from 1922, a member of the Academy of Medicine, devoted  her researches to the study of the chemistry of radioactive  substances and the medical applications of these substances.
In 1921, accompanied by her two daughters, Maria Curie made  a triumphant journey to the United States , where President Warren  G. Harding presented her with a gram of radium bought as the  result of a collection among American women. She gave lectures,  especially in Belgium, Brazil, Spain, and Czechoslovakia. She  was made a member of the International Commission on Intellectual  Co-operation by the Council of the League of Nations. In addition,  she had the satisfaction of seeing the Curie Foundation in Paris  develop and the inauguration in 1932 in Warsaw of the Radium  Institute, of which her sister Bronia became director.
On July 4, 1934, near Sallanches (France), Maria Sklodowska-Curie died of leukaemia, which has a number of standard consequences, one of which can be aplastic anaemia caused by her exposure to the radium that made her famous.
Recognizing Maria Sklodowska-Curie with perhaps its highest posthumous honor in 1995, the French Government transferred her ashes, together with those of Pierre, to the Panth�on in Paris, making her the only woman (she is the first woman, again) to be recognized in this way for her own achievements.
One of Maria Sklodowska-Curie's outstanding achievements was to have understood  the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources, not only  for the treatment of illness but also to maintain an abundant  supply for research in nuclear physics; the resultant stockpile  was an unrivaled instrument until the appearance after 1930  of particle accelerators. The existence in Paris at the Radium  Institute of a stock of 1.5 grams of radium in which, over a  period of several years, radium D and polonium had accumulated,  made a decisive contribution to the success of the experiments  undertaken in the years around 1930 and in particular of those  performed by Irene Curie in conjunction with Frederic  Joliot, whom she had married in 1926. This work prepared the  way for the discovery of the neutron  by Sir James Chadwick and above all the discovery in 1934 by  Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie of artificial  radioactivity. A few months after this discovery Maria Curie  died as a result of leukemia caused by the action of radiation.  Her contribution to physics had been immense, not only in her  own work, the importance of which had been demonstrated by the  award to her of two Nobel Prizes, but because of her influence  on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists.
"My mother was 37 years old when I was born. When I was big enough to know her, she was already an aging woman who had reached the summit of renown. And yet it is the 'celebrated scientist' who is strangest to me - probably because the idea that she was a 'celebrated scientist' did not occupy the mind of Marie Curie. It seems to me rather, that I have always lived near the poor student, haunted by dreams, who was Marie Sklodowska long before I came into the world."
Eve Curie, biographer of her mother
Albert Einstein once said of her:
"Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the one whom fame has not corrupted."
Source: Madame Curie by Irene Curie, DaCapo Press 1937
More in Polish
Over one hundred scientists from 13 countries, among them 12 Nobel prize winners (Baruch Blumberg [1976], Paul Crutzen [1995], Chris de Duve [1973], Leo Esaki [1973], Jerome Friedman [1990], Jerome Karle [1985], Edvard Levis [1995], Rudolf Mossbauer [1961], Burton Richter [1976], Joseph Rotblat [1995], Sherwood Rowland [1995] and Carlo Rubbia [1984]) and Maria Sklodowska-Curie' granddaughter Helene Langevin-Joliot are attending the conference on "The discovery of radium and polonium - scientific and philosophical consequences" which opened in Warsaw Thursday (September 17, 1998) to discuss prospects of the contemporary physics and natural sciences, global ecological threats and the responsibility of scientists for the results of their research. The conference is the highlight of the two-years long now celebrations of the centenary of the discovery of radium and polonium by the Polish-born researcher Maria Sklodowska-Curie. President Aleksander Kwasniewski said he would like the conference to initiate a series of annual "Warsaw meetings" of scholars with politicians and representatives of economic circles, similar to the Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland.