What makes marie curie famous

You changed the world. Her Madame Curie is bold—even arrogant—and not afraid to speak her mind. It just so happens that mine is finer.

In her own time, Madame Curie saw both the positive and negative health impacts of radiation, including its ability to shrink tumors.

Before his untimely death, Pierre, plagued by a hacking cough, was already showing signs of illness from repeated exposure to radiation in their research. She, too, falls prey to radiation-related ailments, leading to her death at 66 on July 4, from aplastic anemia, a blood disease likely due to exposure to large amounts of radiation over her lifetime. Many books, plays and films have drawn portraits of the First Lady—and First Couple—of science.

What I liked about Radioactive was the complex, nuanced way in which Pike portrays the driven Marie Curie and her ambition, determination and imperfections in pursuing a life befitting her brilliant mind. The stick-figure image I had of Marie Curie is replaced with a flesh-and-blood woman who conducts her painstaking science wearing the suffocating high-necked, floor-length dresses of the time. But when she takes those clothes off, we see her as a woman whose romantic and sexual desires led her to risk her illustrious reputation for an ill-fated love affair.

Idols fall hard, and Marie Curie suffered the scorn of France and the world, yet went on to win a second Nobel Prize that year. Madame Curie also aided the French war effort, fighting for funding and even offering to melt down the gold in her Nobel medals for mobile x-ray units that could be taken to the battlefield to help reduce the number of unnecessary amputations.

Already entranced with chemistry, she took advanced scientific degrees at the Sorbonne, where she met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist who had achieved fame for his work on the piezoelectric effect. In , after laboriously isolating various substances by successive chemical reactions and crystallizations of the products, which they then tested for their ability to ionize air, the Curies announced the discovery of polonium, and then of radium salts weighing about 0.

Just before World War I radium institutes were established for her in France and in Poland to pursue the scientific and medical uses of radioactivity. Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw on 7 November , the daughter of a teacher. In , she went to Paris to study physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne where she met Pierre Curie, professor of the School of Physics.

They were married in The Curies worked together investigating radioactivity, building on the work of the German physicist Roentgen and the French physicist Becquerel.

In July , the Curies announced the discovery of a new chemical element, polonium. At the end of the year, they announced the discovery of another, radium. Listen: Jenni Murray discusses her new book, which tells the stories of some of the most fascinating women in global history. In Pierre, Marie found a fellow intellect and confidant, someone with whom she could enjoy both musing over scientific theories and sharing excursions on their bicycles. Love-struck Pierre volunteered to jack in his whole career and move to Poland with her.

So the pair ended up marrying in in the suburbs of Paris, with untraditional Marie wearing a dark blue outfit instead of a bridal dress, which reportedly became one of her lab outfits. Aided by a device that Pierre had invented, Marie set about solving the puzzle of these strange rays. This discovery was nothing short of revolutionary. The gruelling hours paid off.

In June , Marie and Pierre extracted a black powder times more radioactive than uranium, calling their discovery polonium. Marie was unashamedly open about the fact that her native Poland inspired the name. This was groundbreaking. No woman had ever won a Nobel Prize before.

The committee had voted for Becquerel to receive half the prize, and Pierre the other half. So Pierre and Marie ended up both receiving a quarter of the prize. The Curies were the perfect match. While Pierre was a bit of a dreamer, Marie was a great networker, good at promoting their work.

But just when the Curies seemed to be flying high, Pierre had a tragic accident. In April , he tripped under a horse and cart and died instantly from a skull fracture. But behind the steely demeanour, she was devastated. Over time she grew introverted and lost herself in her work.

Do not laugh at me for writing you… But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism!