Chemistry: 1911

Curie, Marie Sklodowska, pronounced KYOO ree,pronounced sklaw DAWF skah (1867-1934), was a Polish-born French physicist who became famous for her research on radioactivity. She was the first woman awarded a Nobel Prize and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, receiving one in physics and one in chemistry. She was also the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne, a famous university in Paris.

Curie and her husband, Pierre, also a physicist, worked together in the late 1890's to study the radiation given off by such chemical elements as uranium and thorium. They found that uranium ore called pitchblende gave off much more radiation than could be accounted for by the amount of uranium known to be in the ore. The Curies then searched for the source of the additional radiation. In 1898, they announced their discovery of two previously unknown, highly radioactive elements, which they named radium and polonium. They worked to separate tiny amounts of these elements from tons of pitchblende.

Marie theorized that radioactivity was a property linked to individual atoms rather than one that depended on the arrangements of atoms in molecules. Later, other scientists showed that polonium and radium were created by a process called radioactive decay or transmutation of the original uranium atoms. That is, the uranium atoms had changed from one element into another by giving off radiation. Previously, scientists had not known that atoms could change in any way.

The Curies' work was inspired by Antoine Henri Becquerel, a French physicist who had also conducted research on radiation. In 1903, Becquerel and the Curies won the Nobel Prize in physics. Becquerel received the award for discovering natural radioactivity and the Curies for their study of radiation. In 1911, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her discovery of the new elements and her work in isolating radium and studying its chemical properties.

Marie Curie was born Marya Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, which was then ruled by Russia. Both of her parents were teachers. She met Pierre Curie in Paris, where she studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry. She died in 1934 of leukemia, probably caused by years of exposure to radiation.

Contributor: Douglas John Crawford-Brown, Ph.D., Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.