Marie Curie: Science in Motion reading Exercise

Maria Skłodowska was born in 1867 in partitioned Warsaw, where Russian authorities restricted Polish-language schools. Her parents, both educators, filled their home with textbooks and clandestine lessons. Because the Imperial University of Warsaw barred women, Maria joined the Flying University, an underground network that offered advanced courses in mathematics, physics, and literature.

Determined to study abroad, she worked as a governess to fund travel while exchanging scientific letters with her sister Bronisława in Paris. In 1891 she moved to France, enrolled at the Sorbonne under the French form “Marie,” and earned degrees in physics and mathematics in just two years. Laboratory work under Gabriel Lippmann and Henri Becquerel sharpened her experimental skills and introduced her to discussions about mysterious “uranium rays.”

After meeting engineer Pierre Curie in 1894, Marie joined his research on piezoelectric crystals, and the pair married the following year. Searching for a doctoral thesis topic, she investigated the intense radiation emitted by uranium and a mineral called pitchblende. By 1898 the Curies announced the discovery of two new elements—polonium and radium—and coined the term “radioactivity” to describe the phenomena they were measuring.

Between 1898 and 1902 the Curies processed tons of pitchblende in improvised sheds at the École de Physique et Chimie Industrielles in Paris. They stirred massive cast-iron cauldrons, concentrating residues until a few centigrams of radium chloride crystallized. In 1903 the Nobel Committee awarded Marie and Pierre Curie, along with Henri Becquerel, the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on spontaneous radiation.

Despite global acclaim, Marie faced institutional barriers. The French Academy of Sciences rejected her membership in 1911, the same year she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for isolating pure radium. Newspapers scrutinized her personal life after Pierre’s death in 1906, yet she persisted, directing the Curie Laboratory and teaching at the Sorbonne, becoming the university’s first female professor.

During World War I she recognized that x-ray imaging could save soldiers’ limbs and lives. Curie designed mobile radiography units nicknamed “petites Curies,” trained volunteer operators—including her daughter Irène—and traveled to the front to calibrate machines. By 1918 over a million wounded soldiers had been examined using the equipment she pioneered.

After the war Curie continued raising funds to build the Radium Institute in Paris, inaugurated in 1914 but expanded throughout the 1920s. The institute housed research labs and a medical clinic where radium therapy was tested against tumors. Curie also traveled to the United States twice—in 1921 and 1929—to accept donations of radium collected by American women’s groups and to advocate for international cooperation in science.

She remained committed to training the next generation. Curie supervised doctoral students from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including future Nobel laureates Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot. She urged governments to create scholarships for women in physics and chemistry, arguing that scientific talent should not be constrained by gender or nationality.

Years of handling radioactive substances without adequate shielding took a toll on Curie’s health. She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a condition linked to prolonged radiation exposure. Her notebooks remain so radioactive that they are stored in lead boxes, yet her legacy endures in cancer treatments, research institutes, and the continued presence of women in laboratories she once could only enter as a guest.