Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland. Her parents were teachers. Her first name was Maria. As a teenager, she made a pact with her sister. Marie would help support her sister's medical studies in Paris. Then her sister would help pay for Marie's studies. For years, Marie worked as a governess and tutor. Then she could study at the Sorbonne in Paris. There, she began to use the French name Marie. She felt unprepared. She worked hard to catch up.
In 1893, Marie finished first in her physics degree. In 1894, she finished second in math. That year, she met Pierre Curie, and they married in 1895. In 1896, Henri Becquerel found that uranium gives off rays, and Marie went on to study these rays. She found that their strength depended only on how much uranium was there. She invented a word for this: radioactivity. The Curies tested a mineral called pitchblende. It was more radioactive than uranium. So they decided it must hold other radioactive elements.
One new element was 400 times more radioactive than uranium. In 1898, it was added to the Periodic Table as polonium. The Curies announced radium in December of that year. Radium is named after the Latin word for ray. To separate it, Marie had to treat very large amounts of that ore. Much of the Curies' work took place in a shed. In 1910, she produced radium as a pure metal. The Curies published how they did it. They did not patent their methods.
French academics first proposed only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the 1903 physics prize. Pierre insisted that his wife share the honor. So Marie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. In 1906, Pierre died in a street accident involving a horse-drawn vehicle. That year, Marie became the first woman to hold a professor's post at the Sorbonne. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes.
During World War I, Marie Curie organized mobile X-ray teams. Her daughter Irène, a scientist, worked with her to provide the units. Marie learned to drive a car so she could run them herself. The cars were nicknamed petites Curies, French for little Curies. X-rays helped doctors find bullets and broken bones in wounded soldiers. Then the doctors could operate more accurately. In 1921, the women of America gave Marie one gram of radium, and U.S. President Harding presented it.
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. In 1935, Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric Joliot won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They won it for synthesizing new radioactive elements. As of November 2026, the Curie Institute in Paris is a center for cancer treatment and research. It has a hospital that treats those patients.
Words to know
- radioactivity: rays from atoms
- pitchblende: a uranium ore
- patent: a legal claim
- governess: a live-in teacher
- synthesizing: making by people
