Meet Marie Curie: The Woman Who Refused to Be Impressed

An education she was not allowed to have

She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, in a Poland partitioned under Russian rule where women could not attend university. So she attended one that did not officially exist — the clandestine "Flying University", which moved between private apartments to avoid the authorities. She worked as a governess to fund her sister's studies in Paris on the agreement that her sister would later fund hers. In 1891 she took the train to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne.

Four years in a shed

With her husband Pierre she began investigating the strange radiation coming off uranium ore. The ore was more active than its uranium content could explain, which meant something else was in there. In 1898 they announced two new elements: polonium, named for the country that would not educate her, and radium.

Proving it meant processing tonnes of pitchblende by hand in an unheated shed, stirring vats with an iron rod nearly her own height, to isolate a fraction of a gram. The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics went to the Curies and Henri Becquerel; she was the first woman to receive one. In 1911 she took a second, in Chemistry, alone — still the only person to have won in two different sciences.

What she did not do

She did not patent radium. The position was that a discovery belongs to everyone and that profiting from it would be contrary to the spirit of science — a decision that cost a fortune and was made deliberately.

In the First World War she built mobile radiography units and drove them to the front so surgeons could locate shrapnel before operating; the troops called them petites Curies. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, almost certainly caused by the exposure nobody yet understood. Her notebooks are still radioactive.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when you are being told the door is closed. She is not sentimental about obstacles and she will not flatter you — she will ask what the measurement says, and whether you have done the tedious part yet.