Marie was the first woman to be enshrined in the Paris Pantheon where she and her husband’s ashes were transferred to in 1995. Even her death from aplastic anemia was most likely due to internal and external exposures to radiation during her career and echoed her achievements in unlocking atomic mysteries and advancing physics, chemistry, and medicine. In 1911, Marie followed up on this finding with electrolysis of radium chloride performed in collaboration with André-Louis Debierne for the final isolation of radium itself.ĭuring the first World War, Marie designed mobile X-ray stations for field diagnosis of injuries, donating her own effort to obtain funding and train imaging staff. While both were credited with the discovery Marie actually did the experiments that led to the finding, while Pierre added his own interpretation to the results. In 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium, although the experiments were done by both examining radium chloride ore mined from the spa town of Jáchymov (which at that time was called Joachimsthal) in today’s Czech Republic (for more information, see below). If there were questions about the Nobel worthiness of a PhD candidate, they were erased in 1911 when she was the sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium and isolation of radium. Her 1903 PhD thesis, Recherches sur les substances radioactives (Curie 1903, 1961 Wolke 1988), secured her share of the Nobel Prize in the same year and struck a death blow to the concept of the atom as indivisible. Inspired to further investigate pitchblende – a uranium source that was found to be more radioactive than uranium itself – they eventually discovered and isolated both radium and polonium as sources of the excess radioactivity. Her lifelong journey with radium (among other radioactive materials) began with Henri Becquerel’s discovery of natural radiation in 1896. Polish-born and French naturalized, Curie was: (1) the first woman to earn a doctorate in France, (2) the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize (The Nobel Prize 1903, shared between Henri Becquerel, and Marie and her husband, Pierre Curie, ‘in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint research on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel’ (The Nobel Prize 1903) (3) the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes in science (The Nobel Prize 2011), won on her own ‘in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element’ (The Nobel Prize 1911) (4) the only person (man or woman) to win two Nobel Prizes in different fields (The Nobel Prize 1903 for Physics and The Nobel Prize 1911, for Chemistry), (5) the first person to coin the term ‘radioactivity’, (6) the first to invent isotope separation techniques, (7) the person to discover the elements polonium and radium, (8) the first and only female member of the seven International Solvay Physics conferences organized from 1911 to 1933 which gathered the most renowned physicists and chemists of the day, (9) the first person to demonstrate the utility of radiation in the treatment of cancer, (10) the first person to head the Red Cross Radiology Service and to develop mobile X-ray and radiation therapy units for World War I military medical use (using her own personal supply of radium to do so), (11) the person who founded the Curie Institute in both France and Poland, (12) the person who wrote her late husband’s biography, (13) a person who served on the International Atomic Weights Committee, and (14) a person who raised a Nobel-winning daughter (Irène Joliot-Curie, Chemistry, 1935). Many detailed and authoritative books have been written about Marie Curie whose remarkable life can be viewed from many perspectives.
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