Marie Curie

Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, when the city formed part of Russian-ruled Congress Poland. Her father taught physics and mathematics; her mother ran a girls’ school. The family faced financial hardship and lost two children, including Maria’s eldest sister and her mother. Russian authorities restricted Polish-language education, but her parents encouraged learning and Polish cultural identity.

Women could not attend university in Warsaw, so Maria took classes at the clandestine ‘Flying University’ and worked as a governess to support her sister Bronia. In 1891 she moved to Paris, where she studied physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne. She lived frugally and earned degrees in an academic world where women had little access to research posts.

In Paris, Maria, who used the name Marie Curie, investigated radiation from uranium compounds and worked with Pierre Curie. They concluded that the radiation originated within the atom and introduced the term radioactivity. In 1898 they announced the elements polonium, named for Marie’s homeland, and radium. Isolating radium required years of chemical work with large quantities of ore and did not provide an immediate commercial or medical application.

In 1903 Marie Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for research into radiation; in 1911 she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on radium and polonium. After Pierre’s death in 1906 she took over his chair and became the Sorbonne’s first female professor. She built laboratories and trained researchers, while choosing not to patent her research results.

During the First World War, Curie organised mobile X-ray units, later known as ‘petites Curies’, and helped train staff to take images in military hospitals. She travelled to front areas and worked on practical radiology with the help of her daughter Irène. The risks of radiation were not yet fully understood as occupational hazards, and precautions against exposure were limited.

Curie lived as universities and laboratories became professionalised and physics and chemistry changed rapidly. Polish cultural institutions were restricted in the Russian Empire, while Paris was an international centre for science. Research depended on university posts, access to equipment and funding; women were generally excluded from formal academic careers and recognition.

The discovery of X-rays and radioactivity generated interest in medical and industrial uses, but the biological effects of ionising radiation were not yet sufficiently understood. Laboratory work often took place without later safety standards. Nobel Prizes and scientific societies offered new forms of public recognition, although the distribution of credit could also reflect gender and institutional hierarchies.

Curie’s research helped make radioactivity a measurable subject in physics and chemistry and produced knowledge later used in nuclear physics and medicine. The discovery of radium contributed to the development of radiotherapy, although medical applications arose through the work of many researchers and doctors. Her mobile X-ray units supported the diagnosis of wounded soldiers and spread practical radiological skills.

As a female Nobel laureate and professor, Curie became a visible example of women’s limited but growing access to science. Her career did not by itself remove institutional barriers, but was used in debates about education and professional opportunity. The risks of radioactive materials became clearer only later; her illness and those of other pioneers contributed to awareness of workplace safety, though no single case can establish every cause.

Marie Curie died in 1934 at a sanatorium in Passy, Haute-Savoie, from aplastic anaemia. Doctors linked her illness to prolonged radiation exposure, but exact doses from her earlier work are unknown. Her laboratory notebooks remained radioactive and are kept under protective measures. She was first buried beside Pierre and was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris in 1995.

Curie’s legacy includes discoveries, research institutions and an influential example of scientific career-building. Her biography has sometimes been reduced to a story of individual perseverance, while historians also emphasise the roles of colleagues, institutions and gender politics. The scientific importance of her work sits alongside the fact that radioactivity enabled both medical applications and harmful exposure.