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History : Hall of Fame : Marie and Pierre Curie
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Marie and Pierre Curie (1867 - 1934 and 1859 - 1906, respectively)
The Curies were French physicists and Nobel laureates, who were wife and husband. Together, they discovered the chemical elements radium and polonium. The Curies' study of radioactive elements contributed to the understanding of atoms on which modern nuclear physics is based. However, it was Marie Curie and her daughter, Joliot-Curie who caught the public imagination. Pierre Curie was born in Paris on May 15, 1859, and studied science at the Sorbonne. Originally named Marja Sklodowska, Marie Curie was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. In 1891 she went to Paris (where she changed her name to Marie) and enrolled in the Sorbonne, where she obtained a physics degree. She met Pierre Curie in 1894, and they married in 1895. Marie Curie was interested in the recent discoveries of radiation. Wilhelm Roentgen had discovered X-rays in 1895, and in 1896 Antoine Henri Becquerel had discovered that the element uranium gives off similar invisible radiations. Curie thus began studying uranium radiations, and, using piezoelectric techniques devised by her husband, carefully measured the radiations in pitchblende, an ore containing uranium. When she
found that the radiations from the ore were more intense than those from uranium itself, she realized that unknown elements, even more radioactive than uranium, must be present. Marie Curie was the first to use the term 'radioactive' to describe elements that give off radiations as their nuclei break down. Pierre Curie ended his own work on magnetism to join his wife's research, and in 1898 the Curies announced their discovery of two new elements: polonium (named by Marie in honor of Poland) and radium. During the next four years the Curies, working in a leaky wooden shed, processed a ton of pitchblende, laboriously isolating from it, a fraction of a gram of radium. They shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with Becquerel for the discovery of radioactive elements. Marie Curie was the first female recipient of a Nobel Prize. When Pierre Curie died on April 16, 1906, Marie Curie continued her own research. In 1911 she received an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for her work on radium and radium compounds. She became head of the Paris Institute of Radium in 1914 and helped found the Curie Institute. Marie Curie's final illness was diagnosed as pernicious anemia, which had probably no connection to overexposure to radiation. She died in Haute Savoie on July 4, 1934 -- aged 66. The Curies had two daughters, one of whom was also a Nobel Prize winner. Iréne Joliot-Curie and her husband, Frédéric, received the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the synthesis of new radioactive elements.
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