Marie Curie

(1867–1934) · Polish-French Physicist & Chemist

Maria Salomea Skłodowska, a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist, was a pioneer in the study of radioactivity. She was the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate in science and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes.

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Marie Curie

(1867–1934) · Polish-French Physicist & Chemist

There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.
In 1906, just as we were definitely giving up the old shed laboratory where we had been so happy, there came the dreadful catastrophe which took my husband away from me and left me alone to bring up our children and, at the same time, to continue our work of research.
Unknown in Paris, I was lost in the great city, but the feeling of living there alone, taking care of myself without any aid, did not at all depress me. If sometimes I felt lonesome, my usual state of mind was one of calm and great moral satisfaction.
During the course of my research, I had had occasion to examine not only simple compounds, salts and oxides, but also a great number of minerals.
The first experiments on the biological properties of radium were successfully made in France, with samples from our laboratory, while my husband was living.
In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements.
In chemical terms, radium differs little from barium; the salts of these two elements are isomorphic, while those of radium are usually less soluble than the barium salts.
My experiments proved that the radiation of uranium compounds can be measured with precision under determined conditions and that this radiation is an atomic property of the element of uranium.
I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.
Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end. Other days, on the contrary, the work would be a most minute and delicate fractional crystallization, in the effort to concentrate the radium.

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