December 2, 2003. Copyright, 2003, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Profile of Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize
By Joanna Griffin

LONDON, December 2, Graphic News:  A century after Polish-born scientist Marie Curie was awarded her first Nobel prize, her legacy is still being combed for a new insight into this remarkable woman whose work on radioactivity changed the course of science and, in due course, of medicine.

At the centre of the centenary celebrations are notes taken at the informal practical science classes Madame Curie gave in Paris almost a century ago. The notes reveal that Curie and fellow intellectuals broke the mould by preparing girls to take the baccalaureat, and have been seized on as evidence that Curie was an early feminist.

More than anything, however, the notes reveal that one of the strongest threads running through CurieÕs life was an unwavering belief in the power of education. Above all, it was this belief that helped to propel her from Russian-controlled Warsaw to the faculty of physics at the Sorbonne, where she gained numerous honours.

Born Maria Sklodowska in 1867 in Warsaw, she was the youngest of five children of teachers. Following the death of her mother from tuberculosis when she was 10, Maria became a disciple of her father, a physics professor whose Polish nationalist views stalled his academic progress in the Russian-controlled education system.

In her teens Maria attended the ÒfloatingÓ university -- clandestine classes organised by Polish professors in defiance of the Russians. Later, she worked for as a governess to pay for her studies at the Sorbonne. After completing a masterÕs in maths, Maria, now Marie, set about looking for a laboratory and found her soulmate.

Few scientific partnerships in history can match that of Marie and Pierre Curie, the physicist whom she married in 1895. Over the next few years they devoted themselves to uncovering the source of the mysterious rays given off by uranium, which had been discovered by French scientist Henri Becquerel in 1896. 

By 1898 the pair had isolated a tiny amount of radioactive material, which they called radium. They went further than Becquerel, and formed a key hypothesis: the emission of rays by uranium compounds could be an atomic property of the element uranium. To describe the behaviour of uranium, Marie used the word ÒradioactivityÓ. In 1903 the Curies won their joint Nobel prize for physics, sharing the honour with Henri Becquerel.

After PierreÕs death in a road accident, Marie devoted herself to her work with
radium, oblivious to its lethal properties, which would eventually kill her. After winning a second Nobel prize in 1911, she spent the first world war operating the first x-ray machines on the battlefields of Europe with daughters Irene and Eve.

Despite health problems resulting from her close work with radium, Curie spent much of her later years raising funds for radiology -- the branch of medicine that uses x-rays and radium to diagnose and treat disease. She was an engaged speaker on behalf of several causes, including the League of Nations, before her death from leukaemia in 1934.

In the century since Curie won her first Nobel Prize, her name has been linked to various campaigns: today radioactivity is used to treat many common ÒfemaleÓ diseases, including womenÕs cancers, and Curie is revered by some as a champion of womenÕs causes. Until the end of her life she shunned the trappings her status brought her, preferring the quiet focus of her laboratory. Einstein said she was rare in not being Òcorrupted by fameÓ.

In remembering Marie Curie, perhaps her own words provide the best clue as to what motivated the small, self-effacing woman whose decigram of radium changed the world: ÒA scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.Ó
/ENDS