Maria Skłodowska was born in
Warsaw to
Polish parents, Bronisława and Władysław Skłodowski, both of whom were teachers and instilled in their children a sense of the value of learning.
Maria was the youngest of five children: Zofia (born 1862), Józef (1863), Bronisława (1865), Helena (1866) and finally Maria (1867).
Maria's early years were marked by the death of her sister Zofia (from
typhus) and, two years later, the death of her mother (
tuberculosis).
These events caused her to give up her Roman Catholic religion and become an
agnostic.
In her youth Skłodowska showed an exceptional memory and
work ethic, and was known to neglect food and even sleep in order to study. At age fifteen she graduated from
high school at the top of her class.
Because she was female, and because of
Russian reprisals following the Polish
1863 uprising against
Tsarist Russia, Skłodowska was denied admission to a regular university. She worked several years as a private tutor while attending
Warsaw's illegal
Floating University and helped support her elder sister Bronisława, who was studying medicine in
Paris. Eventually in 1891, having saved up money earned as a
governess, Maria went to join her elder sister in
Paris.
Skłodowska studied
mathematics, physics and
chemistry at the
University of Paris. (Later, in 1909, she would become that University's first female professor, when she was named to her late husband's chair in physics, which he had held for only a year and a half before his tragic death.) In early 1893 she graduated first in her undergraduate class. A year later, also at the University of Paris, she obtained her
master's degree in mathematics. In 1903, under the supervision of
Henri Becquerel, she received her
DSc from the
University of Paris, becoming the first woman in France to complete a doctorate.
At the University of Paris, she met and married
Pierre Curie. At the time, Pierre Curie was an instructor in the School of Physics and Chemistry, the
École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI). Skłodowska was a student at the
University of Paris, and had begun her scientific career in Paris with an investigation of the magnetic properties of various steels; it was their mutual interest in
magnetism that drew Skłodowska and Curie together.
Eventually they studied
radioactive materials, particularly
pitchblende, the
ore from which
uranium was extracted. By April 1898, Skłodowska-Curie deduced that pitchblende must contain traces of an unknown substance far more radioactive than uranium. In July 1898, Pierre and Marie together published an article announcing the existence of an element which they named
polonium, in honor of her native Poland, then still partitioned among three empires. On
December 26 1898, the Curies announced the existence of a second element, which they named
radium for its intense
radioactivity — a word that they coined.
Over the course of several years of unceasing work in the most difficult physical conditions, they processed several tons of
pitchblende, progressively concentrating the radioactive substances and eventually isolating the chloride salts (refining
radium chloride on
April 20 1902). Polonium was not yet isolated at this time.
In 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded
Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and
Henri Becquerel the
Nobel Prize in Physics, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the
radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel."
Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Eight years later, she received the 1911
Nobel Prize in Chemistry, "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".
In an unusual decision, Skłodowska-Curie intentionally refrained from
patenting the radium-isolation process so that the scientific community could do research unhindered.
A month after accepting her 1911 Nobel Prize, she was hospitalized with depression and a kidney ailment.
Skłodowska-Curie was the first person to win or share
two Nobel Prizes. She is one of only two people who have been awarded a
Nobel Prize in two different fields, the other being
Linus Pauling (Chemistry, Peace). She remains the only woman to have won two Nobel Prizes, and the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different
science fields. Nevertheless, the
French Academy of Sciences refused to abandon its prejudice against women, and she failed by one vote to be elected to membership. (Pierre had been elected to the Academy in 1905.)
On
April 19, 1906, Pierre was killed in a street accident as he was leaving a publishers office. He had gone there to review proofs of an article, and found the business closed due to a strike. Heading back across the street in heavy rain, he was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle and fell under its wheels, fracturing his skull. While it has been speculated that he may previously have been weakened by prolonged radiation exposure, it has not been proven that this was the cause of the accident. Marie was devastated by her husband's death and may subsequently have had an affair with physicist
Paul Langevin — a married man who had left his wife — which resulted in a press scandal, exploited by her academic opponents. Despite her fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude to the scandal tended toward
xenophobia.
Langevin's grandson Michel Langevin later married Skłodowska-Curie's granddaughter,
Hélène Joliot.
During
World War I, Skłodowska-Curie pushed for the use of mobile
radiography units, which came to be popularly known as
petites Curies ("Little Curies"), for the treatment of wounded soldiers. These units were powered using tubes of
radium emanation, a colorless, radioactive gas given off by radium, later identified as
radon. Skłodowska-Curie personally provided the tubes, derived from the radium she purified. Also, promptly after the war started, she donated her and her husband's gold
Nobel Prize medals for the war effort.
After World War I, in 1921 and again in 1929, Skłodowska-Curie toured the
United States, where she was welcomed triumphantly, to raise funds for research on radium. These distractions from her scientific labors, and the attendant publicity, caused her much discomfort but provided resources for her work. Her second American tour succeeded in equipping the Warsaw Radium Institute, founded in 1925, with her sister Bronisława as director.
In her later years, Skłodowska-Curie headed the
Pasteur Institute and a radioactivity laboratory created for her by the
University of Paris.
Her death near
Sallanches, Savoy, in 1934 was from
aplastic anemia, almost certainly due to exposure to radiation, as the damaging effects of
ionising radiation were not yet known, and much of her work had been carried out in a shed with no safety measures. She had carried test tubes containing radioactive isotopes in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, remarking on the pretty blue-green light the substances gave off in the dark.
She was interred at the cemetery in
Sceaux, where Pierre lay, but sixty years later, in 1995, in honor of their work, the remains of both were transferred to the
Panthéon in
Paris.
The Curies' elder daughter,
Irène Joliot-Curie, won a
Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for discovering that aluminium could be radioactive and emit neutrons when bombarded with alpha rays. The younger daughter,
Ève Curie, wrote the biography,
Madame Curie, after her mother's death.
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