Marie Curie

  A notable birthday ...

The physicist and chemist who once said, “Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.” That’s Marie Curie, born in Warsaw (1867), which was then known as the Kingdom of Poland, and was a port of the Russian Empire.

Marie Curie is responsible for developing the theory of radioactivity, which is a term she also coined. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (1903) and the first and only woman to win twice in multiple sciences.

Her parents were poor teachers, and after the Russian authorities removed laboratory instruction in the sciences from schools, her father pilfered the leftover lab equipment, brought it home, and let his children use it freely. Curie was an intelligent and curious child, largely self-taught, and because she couldn’t go to University because of her sex, she studied clandestinely at what was called a “Floating University,” a secret set of informal, underground classes held in Warsaw.

Marie Curie died of the effects of radiation exposure. She had been used to carrying test tubes filled with radioactive material in her lab pockets. Because of the high levels of radioactive contamination, her papers from the 1890s are too dangerous to examine. Even her cookbooks are considered contaminated. Marie Curie’s research is kept in lead-lined boxes.