Curie, Marie (1867-1934)

Polish-born French scientist Marie Curie in her laboratory. She and her husband Pierre Curie discovered the elements of polonium (so-named by her in honour of her native country) and radium in 1898. In 1906, Marie Curie became the first woman to teach in the Sorbonne University, Paris, France, when she was appointed to the professorship left vacant by her husband's sudden death.

Polish scientist who, with husband Pierre Curie, discovered in 1898 two new radioactive elements in pitchblende ores: polonium and radium. They isolated the pure elements in 1902. Both scientists refused to take out a patent on their discovery and were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, with Henri Becquerel, for their research on radiation phenomena. Marie Curie was also awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium, and the isolation and study of radium.

From 1896 the Curies worked together on radioactivity, building on the results of Wilhelm Röntgen (who had discovered X-rays) and Becquerel (who had discovered that similar rays are emitted by uranium salts). Marie Curie discovered that thorium emits radiation and found that the mineral pitchblende was even more radioactive than could be accounted for by any uranium and thorium content. In July 1898, the Curies announced the discovery of polonium, followed by the discovery of radium five months later. They eventually prepared 1 g/0.04 oz of pure radium chloride - from 8 tonnes of waste pitchblende from Austria.

They also established that beta rays (now known to consist of electrons) are negatively charged particles. In 1910 with André Debierne (1874-1949), who had discovered actinium in pitchblende in 1899, Marie Curie isolated pure radium metal in 1911.

Maria Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, then under Russian domination. She studied in Paris from 1891 and married in 1895. In 1906, after her husband's death, she succeeded him as professor of physics at the Sorbonne; she was the first woman to teach there. She wrote a Treatise on Radioactivity (1910).

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Curie helped to install X-ray equipment in ambulances, which she drove to the front lines. The International Red Cross made her head of its Radiological Service. Assisted by daughter Irène and Martha Klein at the Radium Institute, she held courses for medical orderlies and doctors, teaching them how to use the new technique.

By the late 1920s her health began to deteriorate: continued exposure to high-energy radiation had given her leukaemia. She and her husband had taken no precautions against radioactivity. Her notebooks, even today, are too contaminated to handle. She entered a sanatorium at Haute Savoie and died there in July 1934, a few months after her daughter and son-in-law, the Joliot-Curies, had announced the discovery of artificial radioactivity.