Marie Curie

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Through her discovery of radium, Marie Curie led the way for nuclear physics and cancer therapy. Her research work was to cost her her life.

Marie Curie, or rather Marya Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. Her parents were teachers. Marya was a billiant student who dreamed of a scientific career, which was unheard of for a woman in those days. Marya had to work as a tutor to earn enough money to travel to Paris to study.

Marya went to university and gained degrees in Phsics and Mathematics. At univiersity, she met Pierre Curie and married him. Together, Pierre and Marie began their studies of uranium and radio-activity. Marie invented the term: "radio-active" and she found that both uranium and radium were very radio-active.

Pierre tested radium on himself and soon it was being used to treat cancers. In 1903, the Curies were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.

However, the radio-activity began to affect both Pierre and Marie. In 1906 Pierre was run over by a car which he did not see because of his tiredness . Marie struggled on with her work. She brought up and educated her two children and took over her husband's job as professor at the Sorbonne (the University of Paris). She had to fight a great deal of discrimination.

In 1912, she was awarded with a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for determining the atomic weight of radium. When war broke out, she felt that mobile X ray units would help the wounded. She created X ray vans and trained the staff to run them.

After the war, Marie turned her skills to helping cancer patients. She collected funds to finance this. She died of leukaemia in 1934 after having been exposed to very high levels of radiation.

Radioactivity is the starting point for cancer treatment, for the dating techniques used on ancient objects, rocks and the universe, and for molecular biology and modern genetics. It is also the source of nuclear energy and the atomic bomb.

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