Marie Curie

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win the award in two different fields!

The one who sweated in the dim lights of poverty to a heart-breaking struggle of hard work and discovering that brought a way for saving thousands of lives back sacrificing her own giving all of us a beautiful example of what life is all about is none other than Marie Curie. 

Major Work

In late 19’s famous physicist Henri Becquerel found that uranium salts also emitted rays resembling like X-rays and from here the journey begins of Maria to become Marie Curie the discoverer of Radioactivity and the pure form of Radium and Polonium by sacrificing her own life in thousands of radiations which now are of great importance in the medical sciences the therapeutic properties of radium rays against cancer are well recognised. The use of radium in medicine became so common that every kind of disease was treated by radium therapy: cancer, but also, diabetes, sciatica, uraemia, rheumatism, and even impotence!

Early Life & Career

Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw when it was a part of Poland under the Russian empire of Zar. His father was a by profession a physics professor but as her father was engaged in active patriotic and freedom fighter activities he was being fired from the job and at a very early age of childhood Maria has to struggle for food and shelter. But the main tragedy happened when she was only 10 years old and her mother passed away due to tuberculosis. Maria completed his high school studies with a Gold medal after suffering from a depression but the financial conditions of the family was still very bad.

So, Maria made an agreement with her sister, Bronisława, that she would give her financial assistance during Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, in exchange for similar assistance two years later. At the beginning of 1890, Bronisława—who a few months earlier had married Kazimier, a Polish physician and social and political activist—invited Maria to join them in Paris. Maria declined because she could not afford the university tuition; it would take her a year and a half longer to gather the necessary funds. She was helped by her father, who was able to secure a more lucrative position again.

Life in Paris

As per the France government norms the Maria named was changed to Marie. She proceeded with her studies of physics, chemistry, and mathematics at the University of Paris where she enrolled in late 1891. But the life was testing her still the financial crisis was on her to such a extent that she didn’t have a spar of money to spend warmer clothes for her in winter. Maria study during the day time and tutored on evening for the barely earnings for her to pay the fees in university.

She continued studying at the University of Paris and with the aid of a fellowship she was able to earn a second degree in 1894. Maria had begun her scientific career in Paris with an investigation of the magnetic properties of various steels, where she met Pierre Curie. As both of them have interest in physics it brought them closer in a knot of marriage. Soon, they got a project given by Henri Becquerel to work and find the source of the radiations coming from the Pitchblende having some traces of Uranium. Using her husband's electrometer, she discovered that uranium rays caused the air around a sample to conduct electricity. Using this technique, her first result was the finding that the activity of the uranium compounds depended only on the quantity of uranium present. She hypothesized that the radiation was not the outcome of some interaction of molecules but must come from the atom itself. This hypothesis was an important step in disproving the assumption that atoms were indivisible. This led to him the Noble prize in the year 1903 and creating the history that she was the first women physicist to get a Noble Prize.

After which she separated the pure form of polonium from the pitchblende which was a known as a life fatal attempt on the world at that time and her immense hard work in the field of radioactivity made her way for the first time in the history that a women got second noble prize.

Death

She died on 4 July 1934 due to bone marrow failure, possibly myelodysplastic syndrome or aplastic anemia, most likely from exposure to radiation. As Marie has not a high specialized lab to protect herself from radiations at the time of discovery due to the financial crisis. Also, she was not aware how life fatal the radiations can be!

Notable Achievements

• Davy Medal (1903, with Pierre)

• Noble prize in Physics (1903, with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel)

• Matteucci Medal (1904, with Pierre)

• Actonian Prize (1907)

• Noble prize in Chemistry (1911)