Who is Marie Curie?

Marie Curie is a Polish-French chemist who gave the name “radioactivity” to the emission of radiation from atoms. Working with her husband, Pierre, she showed thorium, as well as uranium to be radioactive, and demonstrated that the radioactivity of a substance was proportional to the quantity of radioactive material present. Noticing that the radioactivity in some samples was too high to explain by any concentration of uranium, she set out to isolate the source of the radioactivity. In 1898, she discovered polonium in pitchblende. The radioactivity was not strong enough to explain the observations, however, so further investigations were carried out. Later that year, Marie discovered a trace amount of highly radioactive radium. During the course of four years, the Curies refined eight tons of raw ore to produce one gram of radium. Marie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel for the investigation of radioactivity. In November 1903 the Royal Society of London gave the Curies one of its highest awards, the Davy Medal. Finally, even the academics in Paris began to stir, and a few months later Marie was appointed a director of research at the University of Paris. In later years, Marie and Pierre’s daughter Iréne Joliot-Curie and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie won Nobel Prizes, as did her neighbor and close friend Perrin. As a gift for her scientific discoveries, Marie was presented with a pendant containing radium. Marie died of leukemia caused by overexposure to radioactivity.

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