Jul 27, 20204 min read

The Story of Marie Curie.

“Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood”

Curie was born on the 7th of November 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, to two teachers. Curie’s birth name was Maria Sklodowska. She had always been interested in learning and despite not being able to afford higher education she taught herself in her own time. She became a governess (a governess is a woman employed to teach and train wealthy children) after her mother died from tuberculosis when she was 11. When she was 24 her sister who lived in Paris at the time offered her the opportunity to move in with her, where she would be able to go to University and gain a teachers diploma. She moved to Paris in 1891 and studied maths and physics at Sorbonne University. In 1894 she met scientist Pierre Curie who she married in 1895 and she changed her name to Marie Curie, Marie being the French way to spell her first name.

The couple became research workers at the school of chemistry and physics in Paris where they worked alongside Physicist and Professor Henri Becquerel to study the element Uranium (see below for more details on Uranium). Becquerel had recently discovered that the element uranium was very radioactive the group used a solid mineral called Pitchblende (also known as uraninite) as it contains a lot of uranium. Marie noticed that Pitchblende was more radioactive then Uranium by itself, meaning there must be something that had not yet been discovered also in Pitchblende. The Curie’s focussed on discovering this element and eventually discovered polonium a new element that was 330 times more radioactive than Uranium. Through this she had created atomic physics which was a new field of study and led to her being the first person to use the phrase ‘radioactivity’. To extract polonium from pitchblende, you dissolve Pitchblende in Nitic acid. After extracting Polonium from Pitchblende there is liquid left behind which was also extremely radioactive, they called this new element radium.

She fell pregnant and had a daughter in 1987, whilst being pregnant and becoming a mother she carried on her research with her husband. The Curies found that polonium and radium could be used to destroy tissue, this would go on to be a key way of treating cancerous tumours. In 1903 she became a Doctor of Science, she also became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, winning it for Physics. Becquerel won half of the prize for his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity and Marie and Pierre for their further research.

Sadly in 1906 Pierre was killed after being hit by a horse and cart. In 1910 Curie was denied a membership of the French Academy of Science, despite them recently voting to accept women and her being much more qualified than the majority of men in the academy. A year later she won a second Nobel prize for chemistry in after creating a system to measure radioactivity. She is the only woman who have won two Nobel prizes and one of only two people in history to win a Nobel prize in two fields.

During WW1 she created a small portable X-ray unit that could diagnose injuries such as fractures and bullets in the body, these X-ray units were called “petites curies”. She took Petite Curies across France during the war and taught nurses to use them with her daughter Irene. In 1930 the Marie Curie Hospital opened in North London it was staffed entirely by women and treated female cancer patients. On the 4th of July 1934 she died from aplastic anaemia which is a blood disease caused by large exposure to radiation. The Marie Curie hospital was destroyed in WW2 but in January 1954 The Eden hall Marie Curie Centre opened by the Marie Curie charity and in 2009 it became the Marie Curie Hospice, Hampstead which is open to this day and is still funded by the Marie Curie charity.

Extras:

· Radio activity is the spontaneous decay of an unstable nucleus.
· Uranium has been used for hundreds of years in ancient times it was used to create yellow coloured ceramic glazes. It was first officially discovered as an element by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789 Berlin. After being discovered by Klaporth Uranium was first used for tinting and shading in early photographs.
· In 1897 Becquerel left some uranium salts on a photographic plate as he was studying how light effected these salts, in his research into X-rays’ he noticed that the plate fogged up which indicated that the salts were releasing emissions.
· When the Curies were researching radium, pitchblende was very expensive as it contained so much uranium which was very valuable at the time, but only a small amount of radium could be extracted making it harder to study the element. Curie contacted a factory in Austria that removed uranium from pitchblende and bought huge amounts of their waste uranium.
· In 1935 the Curies daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot won a Nobel prize for their synthesis of new radioactive elements. Synthesis roughly means creation of a chemical compound by combining simpler elements, although it is much more complicated.
· The Eden Hall Marie Currie Centre was built by a charity in Marie’s name and is separate from the NHS. It not only provided care for cancer patients but also support for their family. On top of the centre provided different sorts of care such as it provided treatment for cancer patients along with complementary treatments such as acupuncture, reflexology and physiotherapy. Through the years the centre has changed and adapted e.g. in the early 1990’s it began to accept AID’s patients.
In 2008 the Eden Hall Marie Curie Centre went through a new refurbishment. In November 2009 it reopened as the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead.