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Marie Curie: 1867-1934
In 1903, Marie Curie was the first to work toward developing and extracting benefits from radioactivity while minimizing its enormous risks. More than a century later, this struggle is ongoing.
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Much has been written about Madame or “Marie” Curie, born Marya Salomée Sklodowska, but then who amongst us can boast about having received not one but two Nobel Prizes: the first in physics in 1903 together with her husband Pierre, the second in chemistry in 1911.
Source: Library of Congress, |
In addition, Eve, one of her two daughters, would also receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for discovering artificial radioactivity) in 1935 — only one year after her mother’s death. The truth be told, Madame Curie truly earned the recognition the world bestowed upon her. Yet fame and success did not come to her without numerous challenges and many sacrifices.
In one of her autobiographical notes, Curie muses, “Humanity certainly needs practical men, who get the most out of their works and without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without the slightest doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research.”
In the same altruistic spirit, the Curies declined an invitation to take out a patent on the techniques to extract radium because they believed that, “Physicists always publish their research completely. If our discovery has a commercial future that is an accident by which we must not profit.”
Or more specifically, they felt that patenting research techniques was contrary to the true scientist’s spirit.
Are we not entitled to the fruits of hard labor? Is it not reasonable to get some return on our investment? Not according to Curie. So maybe it does take unlimited magnanimity, infinite generosity of spirit and boundless altruism to earn two Nobel Prizes and raise a daughter who earns another.
Early years
Curie was born on Nov. 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland. Her childhood was mired with challenges. Curie’s mother contracted tuberculosis soon after her daughter’s birth and died 11 years later. She also lost her oldest sister due to typhus.
Meanwhile, economically, the Sklodowska’s had to struggle for their “daily bread.” Her Polish father lost his position as teacher because the Russian authorities, who in those days ruled Poland, did not believe he was sufficiently pro-Russian. He was forced to find alternative work, which paid less.
Immediately after high school, Curie made a considerable personal sacrifice. Having excelled in many subjects and received several awards of distinction, she forwent enrolling at one of the many universities that were courting her. Instead she agreed to start working as a governess and help generate the necessary funds that allowed her older sister Bronya to study medicine at the Sorbonne in Paris.
The quid pro quo was Bronya’s sponsorship of Marie’s studies after Bronya had become a physician. As a result, Curie started her academic education in 1891 at Sorbonne’s Faculty of Sciences. Within two years she became the first woman at the Sorbonne to obtain a Master’s Degree in Physical Sciences, followed a year later by a Master’s Degree in Mathematics.
Meeting her future husband was purely the result of her need to find additional laboratory space to study the magnetic properties of various metals. A friend suggested she talk to Pierre Curie who, as it turned out, was unable to provide her with the required space. But as a result of their first meeting, others followed, initially only to discuss scientific matters; subsequently one assumes they became more personal in nature. They were married on July 26, 1895.
Continuing her research endeavors, Curie decided to pursue a Ph.D. after the birth of her first daughter, Irène. She embarked on studying the source of energy that permitted uranium salts to emit radiation. Curie introduced the term radioactivity.
After many years of hard and strenuous work, she successfully defended her thesis, “Research on Radioactive Substances,” on June 25, 1903, at the Sorbonne. In doing so she became the first woman in France to obtain the title of Doctor of Physical Science.
In the process Pierre and Marie Curie discovered two new radioactive elements: one which they named after Marie’s country of birth, polonium, the other they named radium. The discovery of new elements was not a trivial process at the beginning of the 20th century.
For example, the isolation of 1 g of radium required the treatment of 500 tons of ore, which in turn was obtained from 2,000 tons of sandstone and rocks.
Although the dangers of radioactivity started to be described, the Curies chose to ignore exposure to radioactivity as a health hazard. Marie Curie exposed herself extensively to it. The air she breathed in the laboratory contained radon gas, and, failing to wash her hands, she contaminated her food on a daily basis with radium.
The ill effects of continuous radiation exposure did not go unnoticed by her friends and colleagues; Curie was noted to have lost weight and displayed chronic fatigue. Despite all this, Madame Curie delivered a healthy second daughter, Eve, in 1904.
Nobel prizes
In 1903 the Curies learned that they had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics together with Henri Becquerel, making Marie the first woman Nobel Laureate. The highest of academic awards altered their lives radically primarily because their discovery of radiation and radioactivity quickly became associated with a cure for cancer, something we now know is unfortunately not universally true. Only a few cancers can be cured with radiation therapy only.
The potential dangers of radiation were immediately recognized, as Pierre Curie eluded to in the obligatory lecture before the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm: “It is also conceivable that in the hands of criminals, radium may become very dangerous, and here one may well ask oneself if mankind benefits from knowing Nature, if we are mature enough to take advantage of the benefits, or if this knowledge isn’t harmful to us.”
And so started our efforts to develop as many possible benefits that humankind can extract from radioactivity while minimizing the enormous risks it poses. More than a century later, this struggle is ongoing.
In 1911, the Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded her an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry.
A few years later, during World War I, Curie temporarily dropped her research activities to help a second fatherland — France — in devising movable “radiology cars.” Regular automobiles, equipped with X-ray machines, moved from hospital to hospital, driven by volunteers. After the war, Curie returned to her work in Paris and continued until a few months prior to her death.
In May of 1934, Curie’s health deteriorated and she was diagnosed with pernicious anemia. She died a few months later on July 4, 1934.
The “curie”
The eponym “curie,” for years used to measure the activity of a given radioactive sample, was developed by an international committee that set out to establish an international radium standard to ensure agreement between numerical results obtained in different laboratories. The standard, against which all other radium samples were measured, was kept in Paris. The unit of measurement was given the name “curie” in honor of Pierre Curie. One curie was defined as the amount of material that produces 3.7 × 1010 nuclear decays per second, equivalent to the activity of 1 g of radium. The more recent unit to measure the radioactivity of a radioactive soured is the Becquerel (1 curie = 3.7 × 1010 becquerels).
For more information:
- Max J. Coppes, MD, PhD, is Executive Director of the Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington and Professor of Medicine, Oncology and Pediatrics at Georgetown University.