Wednesday, 08 March 2023
Today is International Women's Day. To honour it I thought I'd share a piece I wrote last year. The physicist, Marie Curie, discovered radium and polonium and was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She became a hero of mine when I was quite young — about nine or ten years old — and read a biography of her by torchlight under the bedcovers at night. I wanted to be her. Unfortunately my ability in maths, physics and chemistry were never up to par :)
Marie Curie (1867 – 1934) at the Sorbonne
MARIE Curie was a woman of firsts. But making her mark in such a way was not her primary concern. She probably didn't even think of her achievements in these terms. Had she not had the legacy of her family's ambition for political and social equality, and a drive to be educated and hard-working, she might well have faltered along the way. But her father, Władysław Skłodowski — Skłodowski was Marie's maiden name — was an academic himself, teaching physics and mathematics at two boys' schools in Warsaw, which meant Marie had a fine example to follow. Władysław encouraged, not only his two sons to be aspirational, but also Marie herself as well as her elder sisters, Bronisława and Helena. Bronisława went on to study medicine in Paris.
For a time Marie worked as a private governess before entering the Flying University, an underground educational institution that operated in Warsaw between 1885 and 1905. At the time this was the only access to higher education for women in Poland. In 1890 Marie took up a training position in the chemical laboratory at the Museum of Industry and Agriculture. A year later she had accumulated sufficient funds to follow Bronisława to the French capital to begin studying physics, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Paris.
Living in a tiny garret, overlooking the rooftops of the city, Marie could barely afford to feed herself, let alone pay for heating. She survived the cold winters by wearing all the clothes she had at once. Her innate ambition to do well and focus on her studies helped to distract her from the chill of her room. During the day Marie attended lectures and continued studying on her own. In the evenings, to earn a little money, she gave classes at different institutions, teaching others what she had learned in her lectures.
Proving herself to be a bright and dedicated student Marie ended her first year at the Sorbonne top of the class. In recognition of her success she was awarded the Alexandrovitch Scholarship for Polish students studying abroad. The bursary helped Marie pay for her accreditations and the degrees in physics and mathematical sciences she needed in order to be fully qualified in her chosen academic fields.
It was in Paris that Marie met her future husband. Through a professor she had been studying with she was put in touch with Pierre Curie who ran a research project to study the magnetic properties and chemical composition of steel. Pierre's scientific expertise was in the field of crystallography which studies the electrical charges produced by applying mechanical stress to certain crystals. This understanding has uses in all the main sciences, from physics, to chemistry and medicine.
Marie and Pierre were married in the summer of 1895. Although their union was a happy one, by all accounts, it only lasted for eleven years. Crossing a Paris street one day in October 1906 Pierre was fatally injured by a stagecoach that had run out of control. Before this unfortunate incident, however, Pierre and Marie, working together, achieved much. Marie had become interested in the work of both the German physicist and mechanical engineer, Wilhelm Röntgen (1845 – 1923), and the French physicist, Henri Becquerel (1852 – 1908). In experiments Röntgen found that passing charges through aluminium tubes creates so-called cathode rays which could be used to 'photograph' human bones. Röntgen carried out tests on his own wife. Becquerel was the first to find evidence of radioactivity in uranium. Its phosphorescent qualities, he realised, could be used to enhance and improve the possibilities offered by Röntgen's theories on x-rays.
Pierre and Marie wanted to delve even deeper into these revolutionary breakthroughs in science and consider how they could be further developed. By undertaking experiments of their own devising, they were able to determine that the element thorium is also radioactive and, hence, discovered other radioactive components which they named polonium and radium. In 1903 the Curies were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, together with Henri Becquerel.
Following Pierre's death, Marie Curie was appointed Chair of the Sorbonne Physics Department, replacing her husband in the position. This made her the first female professor at the University. The post meant Marie now had great influence. It was an opportunity she took to establish a new physics laboratory at the Sorbone as well as create the Institut Curie, a centre of excellence for research into cancer treatments, genetics, epigenetics and integrative tumour biology. Grieving for her husband, Marie embraced the research they had begun together with renewed vigour. She perfected the method of isolating radium from other chemical elements, thereby enhancing their efficacy in the treatment of cancers and other medical uses of radioactivity. She wrote several academic papers on her findings and, in 1911, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. This time Marie was given the honour in her own right. It also made her the first woman, at that period, to have won the Nobel Prize twice.
Pierre and Marie had two daughters. Irène (1897 – 1956) followed in her parents' footsteps, becoming a physicist and politician, while Ève (1904 – 2007) became a writer, journalist and pianist, fleeing France for the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War, eventually taking American citizenship.
Marie Skłodowska Curie — during her lifetime she always used both her maiden and married surnames — died in 1934 at the age of sixty six. The cause of death was given as aplastic anaemia, believed to have been caused by long-term exposure to radiation, damaging her bone marrow.
Marie became the first woman in France to earn a doctorate. Her examiners considered her work a greater contribution to science than any thesis previously submitted to the Sorbonne. During her career Marie received honorary degrees from universities across the world, including Kraków University and the Warsaw Polytechnic in her native Poland. In 1920 she became the first female member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
