If you know anything about radiology or how radiation helps treat cancer, you’ll know that none of today's advances in cancer treatments involving radiology would be possible without the discoveries of Marie Curie.
Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland on November 7th, 1867, she was raised in a time when Poland was under complete control by the czar of Russia, and her family struggled financially because of her father’s Polish patriotism.
By the time Marie graduated high school at the age of 15, her mother and sister had both died from tuberculosis and typhus, and she fell into a deep depression. She visited her cousins in the country to attempt to clear her head, and after returning to Warsaw, Marie and her sister Bronya joined a “floating university.” A floating university was necessary because at that time women were not allowed to study at the University of Warsaw. So, therefore, the classes met at night and in constantly changing locations to avoid detection by the czar’s police.
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| Marie with her sister Bronya - 1886. |
Marie and her sister Bronya were very close and made a pact to help each other with their educations. Marie would work to help pay for Bronya’s schooling, and when Bronya was complete and making money, she would work to help pay for Marie’s schooling. Therefore Marie worked for three years as a governess teaching the children of a beet-sugar factory owner, and during this time a chemist in the factory gave her some lessons on chemistry. (Poles were forbidden to teach laboratory science.) She continued working as a governess after returning to Warsaw in 1889, while secretly studying chemistry at an illegal lab for Polish scientists.
Marie was finally able to head to medical school at Sorbonne University in Paris at the age of 24, and even though she struggled with tuition, rent, and food, she successfully completed her master’s degree in physics and math in three years, earning a scholarship in the process.
Around this time, Marie was paid by the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to investigate the magnetic properties of different steels, but Marie didn’t have a lab. That was when she was introduced to Pierre Curie, who was the Laboratory Chief at the Paris Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. By then, the Spring of 1894, he had already made important scientific discoveries on magnetism and crystals. Pierre convinced Marie to stay in Paris to pursue science, and she convinced him to write up his magnetism research and get a doctoral degree. Needless to say, they fell in love and married in July 1895.
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| Marie and Pierre Curie's wedding day - 1895. |
For two years she completed her research on the magnetic properties of steels, before she had her first daughter, Irene, in 1897. By then, Marie was looking for a research topic that would earn her a doctorate in science, a degree that no woman in the world had completed yet; she then decided to investigate uranium rays.
She soon discovered that the strength of the rays that came out depended only on the amount of uranium in the compound. Usually, normal properties changed according to how you treated a substance, and scientists at that time knew that such properties came from the way atoms combined with one another. They believed that atoms themselves could not change since they had been created at the beginning of time. She decided to try out various chemicals, in which she found that compounds that contained thorium also gave out rays. To describe the behavior of these two elements, Marie made up the term “radioactivity.”
Marie continued to work her way through other compounds, and her husband Pierre worked with her. They eventually discovered two new elements present in the mineral pitchblende (which was rich in uranium) and they named one “polonium” after Poland, and the other “radium,” for the Latin word for ray.
Radium was discovered to be constantly putting out energy, and Pierre also proved that it could damage living flesh, which opened new ways for treating cancer and other diseases. Radium was soon extracted for medical uses and experiments by scientists.
Soon, Marie became the first woman faculty member at France’s top training school for women’s teachers, and in 1903 she completed her doctoral thesis. The committee of examiners even declared that her work had done more for science than any other previous thesis project.
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| Marie in 1903. |
Her work was recognized in 1903 when she and her husband Pierre won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. Pierre was then appointed to a professorship at Sorbonne University, and Marie was hired as a laboratory chief.
In 1906 disaster struck when Pierre slipped on wet pavement on the way to the library and fell in front of a horse-drawn carriage, which ran over his head and killed him instantly. Marie was, understandably, devastated, but she went back to work a day after the funeral. And less than a month later, Sorbonne made her the first woman professor, taking up Pierre’s position.
Around this time she created the Radium Institute with the help of the French government and scientist friends, where she headed the radioactivity lab. She also taught physical science once a week at a cooperative school, where her daughter Irene and a few other students got lessons from their parents.
Marie won a second Nobel Prize for her discovery of radium and polonium in 1911, and in 1914, as Germany invaded France, nearly every member of the staff at the Radium Institute enlisted in the war effort. Marie convinced wealthy people to donate their cars, and with them, she assembled a fleet of 20 mobile X-Ray stations as well as 200 stationary stations for doctors on the battlefield. Her teenage daughter Irene also helped as an assistant to her mother, and later directed X-Ray stations by herself. Marie also discovered that radioactive gas that comes from minerals containing radium could be prepared in tiny glass tubes and inserted into patients at spots where the radiation would destroy diseased tissue.
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| Marie driving a mobile X-Ray clinic - 1915. |
The war ended in 1918, and Marie went back to raising money for the Radium Institute. She even came to America and gained a gram of radium so powerful it could fuel thousands of experiments, as well as expensive equipment and quite a bit of money for the institute.
The Radium Institute became a world center for research and Marie carefully selected several dozen scientists to work with. In 1934, her daughter Irene and son in law Frederic Joilot Curie discovered artificial radioactivity, but, sadly, Marie died before she could see them receive the 1935 Nobel Prize for their discovery. She died on July 4th, 1934 from aplastic anemia, which is a blood disease directly related to radiation exposure. Today, 83 years after her death, Marie Curie's possessions are still so radioactive that they cannot be handled without protection, most notably her notebooks. Her body was even placed in a coffin lined with an inch of lead.
In 1995 Marie's remains, as well as Pierre’s, were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, where they now lie among France’s greatest citizens. The president of France remarked that the transfer demonstrated the nation’s respect for all those, like the Curie’s, “who dedicate themselves to science.”
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| Marie with her daughter Irene - 1925 |
Without Marie Curie, we would not have the advanced treatments for cancer involving radiation that we have today. Other uses for radiation besides X-Ray technology include nuclear reactors, sterilization for medical equipment, and restoring eyesight to the blind.
