Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, and her parents were both teachers. Her first name was Maria. She finished high school at age 15 with the highest honors. As a teenager, she made a pact with her sister that Marie would help support her sister's medical studies in Paris. Then her sister would help pay for Marie's own studies. Before she could study at the Sorbonne, she worked for years as a governess and tutor. She then moved to Paris, France, to study at a university, and when she registered at the Sorbonne, she began to use the French name Marie. She felt unprepared, but she worked hard to catch up. She met Pierre Curie in 1894, and they married in 1895.
Marie and Pierre worked together as scientists, and they found two new elements, polonium and radium. Her method began with a puzzle, because natural chalcolite was more radioactive than its uranium content predicted. To check why, she prepared a synthetic version from pure products. Its activity matched its uranium content, so the extra activity in natural minerals needed another explanation. She said the Curies' conviction that the new elements were real rested on the atomic nature of radioactivity. To prove it, they had to isolate them. For radium, that took several years of unremitting effort. Marie never succeeded in isolating polonium. It has a half-life of only 138 days, and the reason was not understood until radioactive decay was developed.
Her rules for her work were clear. She would push the precision and rigor of measurement to the extreme, she would obtain samples that are pure or of maximum concentration even if that meant handling enormous quantities of raw materials, and she would state general laws only when there were no exceptions. Much of the Curies' work took place in a shed. To separate radium, Marie had to treat very large amounts of pitchblende ore. She named polonium after Poland, the country where she was born. The name of the other metal comes from the Latin word for ray. Radium gives off both light and heat. In 1906, Marie became the first woman to hold a professor's post at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Industry helped, because in 1904 the French industrialist Armet de Lisle, whose factory would provide radium to doctors, began collaborating with the Curies. They gave him technical suggestions on treating pitchblende, and in return they could accumulate larger samples of radioactive material. A chemical company also helped. André Debierne adapted their lab techniques into larger industrial processes. The company supplied chemicals and paid staff in exchange for a share of the radium salts extracted. The Curies published how they isolated radium and did not patent their methods. In 1910, Marie produced radium as a pure metal. She was charged with preparing an ampule of about twenty milligrams for the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, where it would serve as the standard for radium.
The prizes had their own politics. French academics first proposed only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the 1903 physics prize, but Pierre insisted that his wife share the honor, so Marie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. The 1903 citation was worded to avoid mentioning polonium and radium. Chemists on the committee thought the discovery might later deserve a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and doubts remained about elements isolated only in invisibly small amounts. In 1911, Marie won that second prize, in chemistry, and she was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. The Academy said research on radium had led to the birth of a new branch of science, radiology, which already had its own institutes and journals in the great scientific countries.
In 1920, Curie and colleagues created the Curie Foundation to support the scientific and medical divisions of the Radium Institute, and over the next two decades it became a major international force in the treatment of cancer. During World War I, Marie had organized mobile X-ray teams, and her daughter Irène, a scientist, had worked with her. She learned to drive a car so she could operate the X-ray vehicles herself. The Curies did not fully understand how dangerous the radioactive materials they handled were. Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934, of aplastic anemia, a blood disease that often results from exposure to large amounts of radiation. As of November 2026, the Curie Institute in Paris is a center for cancer treatment and research, and it has a hospital that treats those patients.
Words to know
- chalcolite: a uranium mineral
- isolate: separate out
- ampule: a sealed vial
- radiology: study of radiation
- synthetic: made by people
