Marie Curie-Sklodowska

Young Marie Curie (Emilio Segre Visual Archives)

Early Life & Childhood
Maria Skłodowska was born November 7th, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland. From an early age, she was known to have an excellent memory, remarkable intellect, and showed great promise. She had five siblings, of which she was the youngest. When she was young, her mother, Bronia, died of tuberculosis, and only two years earlier, her sister, Zofia, fell victim to typhus. When Manya, as she was nicknamed, was sixteen, she won a gold medal for her completion of her secondary education. A studious teenager, she reputably even gave up eating, drinking, and sleeping to pursue her studies. Even at such an early age, she showed promise of great achievements to come.

Young Adulthood – Preceding Fame
At the time, Russian rule looked down on Polish citizens, especially Polish women seeking an education. Sadly, this meant Maria could not attend a university and follow her growing interest in science and chemistry. Then, due to some poor investments, the Skłodowski family lost a good deal of money. Thereby unable to fund her hopes of attending university, Manya was forced to take up a job as a teacher. Due to her inability to fund a mainstream education, she attended an illegal Polish 'floating university.' This university was created for the purpose of giving Polish students the chance to go against the Russian regime, which controlled all Polish education and tried to assimilate the Polish culture into theirs. When she was eighteen, she took up a position as governess. This was to help her sister, Bronisława (named after her mother), pay for university. In turn, Bronia agreed to help Manya do the same. After some time, in 1891, Maria finally left behind her home to study in Paris.

Life Upon Arrival in Paris, & What Became of It
Unsurprisingly, Marie (the French form of her name) studied Math, Science, and Chemistry at the University of Paris. She graduated top of her class, and became the very first woman in France to earn a Doctorate of Science. Little did she know exactly how much she was to be the first to accomplish. However, despite her slightly brighter future, she did not have much to call her own at the time. She lived in a small, highly drafty student’s loft, and ate very little other than bread and butter. In the wintertime, to escape the chill, she used to use every single item of clothing she owned in order to stay warm. On the brighter side, she was fast becoming known for her almost unsurpassed skill (for the time, and considering that then, women were rarely known for exceeding standards in science and mathematics) in chemistry and physics. Over the course of her work, she came to meet Pierre Curie, a scientist eight years older than her, and already of importance in the scientific community. The two of them shared a passion for science, and a piqued interest in magnetism. At first sharing only the same ideals, they were married in 1895, only four years after Marie came to Paris. The two of them combined were a scientific force to be reckoned with, indeed. They both continued to devote themselves solely to their work and research. But when they were not working, they liked to take bike rides, and enjoy the rare peace it brought them.

Radium (Online Biography on Marie Curie)

Discoveries and Resulting Fame
The birth of their daughter, Irene, in 1897, changed very little of their routine. Pierre submitted his thesis on magnetism, and Marie earned her teacher’s diploma. Marie started studying radiation emitted by uranium, a fact first discovered and hypothesized about by scientist Röntgen Becquerel. She started studying different ores containing uranium, and the differing amount of rays they emitted. She soon found that pitchblende, one of these ores, emitted much more radiation than should have been possible considering the amount of uranium it contained. She could only hypothesize that this was because pitchblende must have contained some different substance that radiated far more than uranium. Due to this remarkable discovery, Pierre forsook his research on crystals to aid Marie in her work. Together, they managed to uncover this substance, at that time an unheard-of metal they named Polonium. They named it this in honor of Marie’s home country, to which she never returned as she had originally planned before meeting Pierre. And as if one weren’t enough, they also discovered a highly radioactive metal called Radium. The two also were responsible for first calling the rays that these substances emitted, ‘radiation.’ These two discoveries won Pierre a Nobel Prize, and Marie not only one, but two – her and her husband’s first in 1903, and later, in 1911. However, tragedy befell them on April 19, 2006, when Pierre was hit by a horse-drawn carriage and killed. After his death, Marie suffered depression and sickness, but managed to pull through. For the remainder of her lifetime, she devoted what little she had to give to helping people.

In Short…
I look up to Marie Curie because, in a time when the odds were against her, she still managed to achieve her dreams and be the first in so many categories – first woman to win a Nobel Prize, first to discover polonium and radium – all things that I know, to this day, still play important roles in the world of science.