The Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland was founded in 1944, in honour of one of the brightest female scientists the world has seen. Just fifty years prior, no university in Poland would give the young Marie Skłodowska a research position, simply because she belonged to the wrong gender.
The Pierre and Marie Curie University overlooks the Seine River in Paris; it is the largest scientific and medical research centre in France. Established in 1971 following the division of the University of Paris (better known as the Sorbonne), it was where Marie Curie had earned degrees in mathematics and physics, and became its the first female professor in 1906.
However, her professorship came at a steep cost: only after her husband’s death in an accident, did Sorbonne’s physics department decide to let her retain control over the Curies’ joint laboratory and award her Pierre’s position.
Marie Curie is famous for having coined the term ‘radioactivity’ in 1898. She did not, in fact, discover radioactivity, but she proved that this mysterious radiation must come from the atom itself, independent of molecular interaction and external excitement. The Curies shared a Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on radioactivity.
The Curies also discovered two new radioactive elements during their research. Marie named polonium after her home, Poland, to highlight its lack of independence. Poland at the time was under Russian, Austrian, and Prussian partition, and would not be its own country for another twenty years. The isolation of pure radium came after Pierre’s death. For this, she won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes.
The discovery of radium would later provide a source of radioactivity for Ernest Rutherford to probe the structure of the atom. Radium also offered a means to develop radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer. During World War I, Marie and her daughter, Irene, devoted themselves to building mobile X-ray vehicles so wounded soldiers can receive radiography diagnosis in the field. These units were nicknamed petites Curies and were powered by tubes of radium emanation.
Unfortunately, Marie Curie’s work inspired some depraved applications as well. She refused to patent the isolation process for polonium and radium so access to these elements would be easy for other researchers. However, before the effects of radioactivity could be thoroughly studied, private enterprises rushed to profit off these elements. Businesses claimed that radium had curative properties and marketed skin cream, toothpaste, and even food items containing radium. In the mid-1920s, a watch company used radium-based luminous paints to decorate the dials of clocks and wristwatches. The women who performed this work would often lick the tips of their paintbrushes to produce a finer stroke. Their exposure to radium caused anemia, and bone cancer. This was a first warning about the dangers of radioactivity. Marie Curie herself had been showing signs of radiation poisoning for years.
On a side note, Marie Curie hardly deserves to be credited with the invention of the atomic bomb. The grandmother of the atomic bomb, on a far stretch, can barely be attributed to Marie and Pierre’s daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie. Along with her husband Frederic, she discovered artificial radioactivity, which allowed radioactive isotopes be created in the lab (for the intention of creating cheap radiation sources for medical applications). A separate group of German scientists discovered nuclear fission based on her research. From there, we can play the blame game with physicists on the Manhattan Project and the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Leave a Reply