What do you need to know about the trailblazer who wore a talisman capsule containing radium around her neck instead of jewelry, worked for 12 years without protective gear while exposed to ionizing radiation, gave birth to two daughters during that time (the third did not survive), and shortened her life through unprotected contact with dangerous elements? Perhaps some insight into her life journey can be gleaned from the words of the founder of a scientific dynasty, who encouraged those who see her story as an inspiration: “I wish women a happy realization in family and pursuits that interest them. I was captivated by exploring the world, but there is no need for such an unnatural life as mine.”
The Incredible Obvious
We are talking about the first scientist in history to be awarded the Nobel Prize twice: the only instance of a single individual receiving recognition for achievements in two natural sciences—physics and chemistry. She was the first woman Nobel laureate, as well as the mother of a daughter who also received a Nobel Prize. The first female university lecturer: a professor at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). The first woman member of the French Academy of Medicine and 106 scientific societies. The creator of the “Radium Institutes” in Paris and Warsaw. The holder of two dozen honorary scientific degrees and medals from the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Arts in Great Britain, the National Academy of Sciences in Italy, and the Franklin Institute (USA). A long-time participant in international physics congresses and a permanent representative of the League of Nations’ Commission on Intellectual Cooperation. We are speaking of a unique researcher who paved the way for medical radiology. The discoverer of radium and polonium—new chemical elements that demanded personal sacrifices from the experimenter for the progress of humanity.
At the dawn of the 20th century, such a career was unattainable for women. How did this extraordinary individual manage to gain recognition, representing a unique interest for researchers?
Early Losses
Maria Skłodowska grew up in Warsaw (born November 7, 1867) and received the best education available at the time for Polish girls by the age of 16: she graduated from school. She was fortunate to be born into a teaching family—her father, Władysław Skłodowski, was the director of a boys’ gymnasium (a graduate of St. Petersburg University who wrote poetry, translated from six languages, and taught mathematics, chemistry, and physics), and her mother, Bronisława Boguska, ran a school for girls. However, her mother did not have the opportunity to care for her daughters’ education: she left her job due to tuberculosis, adding to her husband’s burdens as he found himself with a sick wife and five children.
Władysław Skłodowski and his daughters (from left) Maria, Bronisława, and Helena, 1890.
The situation worsened with the loss of money due to a relative’s bankruptcy, in which the family head had unwisely invested, and a demotion at work due to anti-government sentiments he was accused of in 1873. He had to open a boarding house, providing lodging, food, and education for guests. This brought disease into the home: two children fell ill with typhus, which claimed the life of the eldest daughter, Zofia. And in the year when the youngest Maria was to start school, her mother died from tuberculosis.
Survival Instinct
These early losses forced the children to mature quickly: all four were distinguished by their hard work and independence, graduating from school with gold medals. However, while their brother Józef could continue his studies at the medical faculty, girls were not admitted to the University of Warsaw. Maria had to study clandestinely at an illegal “flying university” (women’s courses constantly changed lecture locations).
To pay for her education and help her sisters and father, Skłodowska worked as a tutor and governess. She worked in the estates of wealthy families, caring for five children while also teaching younger students. For four years, Maria taught Polish to peasant children, and at night, she engaged in self-education. As she later noted, “Curiosity is a survival instinct.”
The girl learned everything life offered her: composing poetry, ice skating, rowing a boat, and riding (she had been riding horses since her youth and driving a carriage). Later, Skłodowska became a fan of cycling trips and mountain climbing (for horseback riding, cycling, and climbing in the Tatras, Maria wore pants), and she was the first woman to obtain a driver’s license.
To See Paris and…
When her sister Bronisława married a Polish doctor-emigrant and invited Maria to join them in Paris, after a year of contemplation, Skłodowska decided to move. However, just six months later, she moved from her sister’s place to a separate room she rented near the Sorbonne. This was all that interested Maria in the Latin Quarter, and for such a goal, she was willing to live in a cold attic where water would freeze in a pitcher overnight, heat tea on an alcohol burner, and eat whatever she could find. The disorganized living conditions meant nothing to the passionate student. Even when she fainted from hunger, she felt happy because she had the opportunity to pursue her dreams.
Maria (left) and sister Bronisława, circa 1886.
Maria enrolled at the University of Paris. Unlike the Poles, the French accepted girls for education. However, among 9,000 students, there were only 210 women. Women were primarily admitted to study medicine. Mathematics, chemistry, and physics, which Skłodowska chose, were studied by only 23 girls out of 1,825 students in the Faculty of Natural Sciences in 1891. Only two graduates, including Maria Skłodowska, reached the diploma. Earning money through tutoring, the student who excelled in her studies graduated first in her class, achieving the second-best result among all students. Interestingly, she voluntarily returned the amount of her previous scholarship to support another diligent student.
A Gift from Fate
Maria Skłodowska would later refer to her meeting with Pierre Curie in her memoirs as “a gift from heaven.” At the beginning of 1894, the head of the laboratory at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry provided the gray-eyed blonde, who charmed him with her feminine beauty and scientific focus, with a table for experiments. Eventually, this new acquaintance became her friend, colleague, and husband.
Coming from a family of medical professionals, Pierre graduated from the Sorbonne at just 16. At 18, he discovered the piezoelectric effect with his brother and continued researching ferromagnetic materials, which Skłodowska also experimented with. Initially, Maria studied the magnetic properties of metals, quickly finding common ground with her seven-years-older colleague, who was interested in magnetism.
Pierre Curie and Maria Skłodowska, 1895.
Pierre taught Maria how to work with the apparatus that would later allow them to study the radiation of elements. Following a gift devoid of romance—his own article “On Symmetries in Physical Phenomena”—the 35-year-old Curie contemplated the symmetry and attraction in their fates. He proposed to 28-year-old Maria, stating it was the only decision he had no doubts about.
Maria was charmed by Pierre’s willingness to learn Polish and move to her homeland. She cherished the sense of security instilled by this calm and self-assured man with a youthful smile that inspired trust. After being denied a position at Jagiellonian University (in Krakow, no woman lecturer was accepted in any department), Skłodowska accepted his marriage proposal.
Daughters and Mothers
In the summer of 1895, Pierre and Maria married in the suburbs of Paris, where Pierre’s parents lived. The registration of their marriage took place without guests, a ceremony, veils, or rings. The bride wore a dark blue suit, which she later wore in the laboratory. For their honeymoon in Île-de-France, the couple set off on bicycles they had bought as a wedding gift.
Two years later, their daughter Irène was born. The delivery was attended by Pierre’s father—retired doctor Eugène Curie. Later, due to the scientific commitments of her parents, her grandfather took on the responsibilities of raising his granddaughter. Irène continued her parents’ work in synthesizing substances and also became a renowned researcher in physics and chemistry.
In the future, she would discover artificial radioactivity with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, for which both would receive, like her parents, the Nobel Prize. Irène’s daughter, Hélène (also a nuclear physicist), would become a professor at the University of Paris, while Pierre’s son would become a biochemist at the National Center for Scientific Research—grandchildren of Skłodowska-Curie.
Maria and Pierre Curie with their daughter Irène, circa 1902.
Maria’s next pregnancy ended in August 1903 with the birth of a stillborn girl at five months. The tragedy could have been caused by either the constant doses of radiation (the future mother conducted dangerous research even at home) or an exhausting bicycle trip taken at an inappropriate time.
The second daughter, Eva, was born in 1904, when her father, Pierre Curie, was already a professor of physics at the Sorbonne, and her mother, Maria Skłodowska-Curie, was managing her husband’s laboratory. The younger daughter was cared for by governesses and became a journalist, pianist, head of UNICEF in Greece, and biographer of her mother. Unlike her elder sister, who worked with radioactive materials and died at 58, the younger daughter, distanced from laboratory conditions, lived to be 102.
A Gift to Humanity
Pierre also studied the nature of radiation, while Maria became interested in this issue after the research of uranium compounds by French physicist Henri Becquerel, who established the fact of rays penetrating based on their ability to expose photographic film (all three researchers would receive the Nobel Prize). During experiments, Skłodowska-Curie hypothesized the presence of an unidentified impurity in the substance obtained from uranium pitchblende that enhanced the effect. The undiscovered metal she identified was named polonium in honor of her homeland (from the Latin name Polonia). In addition to discovering the phenomena of radioactivity, the remarkable Polish scientist was credited with the chemical isolation and determination of the atomic mass of radium and polonium.
At the beginning of their work studying radioactivity, Skłodowska and Curie were unaware of the dangers of radiation. The scientists isolated the most expensive metal in a stable environment. From 1898 to 1902, the couple processed eight tons of uranium ore in a poorly ventilated shed with a leaking roof. To isolate 0.1 grams of radium chloride in 1902, they needed four years. Maria wrote that having the funds and proper equipment would have allowed them to complete the complex work in a year.
At the same time, the scientists decided to forgo patenting the discovery of radium, offering it to humanity free of charge. At that time, the value of a gram of the substance was $100,000. There was no more expensive metal in the world at the beginning of the 20th century.
Hostile Matter
In 1904, the price of a gram of the substance rose in France to 750,000 francs. The transformation of radium into a marketable product, which began to be produced on an industrial scale, was facilitated by the discovery of radiotherapy. Maria and Pierre proposed using medical radiology to treat skin diseases and cancer after studying the effects of radiation on their own living tissues. “The epidermis destroyed by radium turns into healthy skin,” Skłodowska-Curie recorded in her diary. Due to constant contact with radioactive samples, the couple’s hands became covered with sores. But even this fact was used by the scientists for the benefit of progress: in medical practice. Thus unfolded the unexpected story of the discovery of radium.
“A discovery does not emerge from a scientist’s brain fully formed; it is the result of extensive preliminary work and a series of failures,” Skłodowska-Curie wrote. “The life of a laboratory researcher bears little resemblance to the calm idyll that some imagine. It is years of focused searching and many doubts when you struggle with despair, the world, and yourself. At such times, matter itself seems hostile.”
While Pierre suffered from pains during research that doctors mistook for rheumatism or neurasthenia, Maria lost weight and suffered from anemia, later secretly undergoing cataract surgery, which could have been an early manifestation of radiation sickness. When, in the late 1960s, descendants transferred letters, diaries, articles, and books of the Curie couple to the National Library, their archive still posed a danger due to increased radioactivity. Consequently, after sanitization, all documents were placed in special containers.
Reflecting later on the significance of her discoveries, Skłodowska-Curie concluded: “Fire burns. But what would we do without it? There is nothing to fear. There is only what needs to be understood.”
The Nature of Calamity
The awarding of the prize allowed them to equip the laboratory with new equipment and purchase a bath for their home. In other respects, their lifestyle remained the same: ascetic and focused on discoveries. As their daughter Eva Curie confirmed, few visitors came to them, and the girls were unaccustomed to strangers: Irène was frightened of outsiders and did not greet guests—this trait remained with her from childhood.
Valuing time, the experimenters could not afford to waste it foolishly. “The fatigue from work is intensified by the intrusion of the community,” Maria Curie wrote. “The disruption of our voluntary isolation causes suffering and has the nature of calamity. Along with honor and fame came anxiety into our lives. People interfere with work in every way—it’s all a bustle. Eventually, I gathered the courage to announce that I would not receive anyone.”
Maria confessed to her brother that she did not respond to letters but was forced to waste time reading them: “Hundreds of requests for autographs and photographs, letters from inventors, spirits, and philosophers, sonnets and poems about radium—even throwing all this away would be a shame. And yesterday, some American asked for permission to name a racehorse after me.”
Maria’s friend Albert Einstein always supported her in science, but in life, he gave her a controversial characterization: “Madame Curie is very intelligent but as cold as a fish: she lacks emotions—both sad and joyful. She expresses her feelings in only one way: she grumbles if something displeases her.”
Unable to Change
In this, the author of the theory of relativity was only partially correct. Beneath the external severity and detachment of the researcher, as evidenced by Skłodowska-Curie’s diaries, the woman concealed a passionate soul. “Constantly, new wonders of nature brought me joy, like a child,” Maria wrote. We also find in her diaries this confession: “People who perceive the world as sensitively as I do, and are powerless to change anything within themselves, must hide this trait of their nature for as long as possible.”
After the death of her husband (on April 19, 1906, Pierre Curie was fatally struck by a horse-drawn carriage while crossing the street), the widow placed her photograph in his coffin and fell into a long depression, from which she was pulled out by a new passion. Four years later, Maria began an affair with a married student of her husband. He even challenged a reporter to a duel who published the sensational news. Fortunately for everyone, the duelists did not dare to shoot, and the renowned scientist returned to his family. Despite the fact that he never left his wife and children, the scandal could have cost the “homewrecker” her career: after Pierre Curie’s tragic death, Skłodowska took his place at the University of Paris. For the first time, a woman succeeded in becoming a lecturer and obtaining a department, but in the elections to the French Academy of Sciences, the majority did not vote for her.
Maria Skłodowska-Curie with her students.
Subsequently, Maria ceased to nominate herself and even twice declined (reportedly for pacifist reasons) the Legion of Honor. During World War I, Maria Curie donated funds for mobile X-ray machines for field hospitals, which could save soldiers’ limbs from amputation. Skłodowska traveled to the front lines with her elder daughter and taught doctors how to work with the new technology.
Maria Curie outlived her husband by 28 years, wrote memoirs about her closest collaborator, and continued her studies on radioactivity. In the spring of 1934, tests showed negative changes in the researcher’s blood composition, and on July 4, Maria Curie died at the age of 66 from anemia caused by ionizing radiation. Officially, she is recognized as one of the first victims of radiation sickness. In 1995, the remains of the Curie couple were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris as national heroes.