Marie Curie

The room on the sixth floor

Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born in Warsaw on 7 November 1867, the fifth child of two schoolteachers, in a Poland that had been partitioned out of existence — divided up in the previous century between Russia, Prussia and Austria — and whose Russian-ruled provinces kept universities closed to women. Her elder sister Bronia wanted to study medicine; Maria wanted physics; neither could do it at home. The two made a pact, and Maria spent years as a live-in governess in the Polish countryside sending money to Bronia in Paris before it was her turn. She was twenty-four when she finally came, arriving in November 1891 and enrolling at the Sorbonne, the science faculty of the University of Paris, in the Latin Quarter — the university district of the 5th arrondissement that had been the city's schoolroom since the Middle Ages.

She had almost nothing. Years later she described the room she took in the quarter with the flatness of someone who has decided not to make a story of it: "I lived at that time in a room on the sixth floor of a house situated near the schools. It was a poor little room, for my resources were extremely limited. I was, nevertheless, very happy in it." She had arrived under-prepared next to the French students and knew it, so she divided her days between lectures, the laboratory bench and the library, and her evenings between the room and the mathematics she had to catch up on — "sometimes very late into the night." By the end of the first year she had dropped the Polish student circle she had joined, because all her energy had to go to the work. She took a degree in physical sciences in 1893 with the top mark, and one in mathematics in 1894.

A small commission to measure the magnetic properties of steels put her, in 1894, in a room with Pierre Curie, a thirty-five-year-old physicist teaching at the city's School of Physics and Chemistry at 42 rue Lhomond. She had meant to take her two degrees back to Poland and teach. Instead they married on 26 July 1895 — she wore a dark dress she could work in afterwards — and she stayed in Paris for the rest of her life.

The shed, and what came out of it

In 1896 the French physicist Henri Becquerel found that uranium salts left in a drawer had fogged a photographic plate: the mineral was giving off rays of its own, with nothing done to it. Marie Curie made those rays her doctoral subject, and in 1898 established that pitchblende — the heavy black ore that uranium is mined from — was far more active than its uranium content could explain. Something else had to be in it. In July she and Pierre announced a new element and named it polonium, after her occupied country; in December, a second, radium. She coined the word for what the two of them did — radioactivity, the spontaneous emission of radiation by a substance itself.

Proving it meant getting the elements out of the rock, and the rock was mining waste: several tons of uranium residue from the mines at Sankt Joachimsthal in Bohemia — now Jáchymov, in the Czech Republic — bought cheap because nobody wanted it. The only space they could get was an abandoned storeroom across a courtyard from their workroom at the School of Physics and Chemistry — in her words, "a wooden shed with a bituminous floor and a glass roof which did not keep the rain out," furnished with worn pine tables, a stove that worked badly, and the blackboard Pierre liked. There were no fume hoods — the ventilated cabinets that draw poisonous gases away from a chemist — so the fumes were dealt with by working out in the courtyard, or by opening the windows and carrying on. She handled twenty kilograms of material at a time and stirred boiling residue with an iron bar for hours. It took four years. In 1902 she had a decigramme — a tenth of a gram — of pure radium chloride, and with it the atomic weight that made radium undeniable. Her 1903 doctoral thesis was built on that work.

The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics went half to Becquerel and half, jointly, to Pierre and Marie Curie — the first Nobel Prize awarded to a woman. On 19 April 1906 Pierre was knocked down and killed by a horse-drawn wagon on a Paris street. The Faculty of Sciences handed his course and his laboratory to his widow, which is to say to Marie herself; she lectured for the first time on 5 November 1906 to a room packed with students, journalists and the merely curious, and in 1908 was made full professor in the chair itself — the first woman to hold a university professorship in France.

1911: the Academy, the newspapers, the second Nobel

1911 gave her the worst year and the greatest honour of her life within eleven months. In January she stood for election to the Académie des sciences, France's national body of scientists, and was rejected; no woman would be admitted for another half-century. In November the Paris press published private letters between her and the physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre's who was married and separated from his wife, and turned the affair into a public campaign against her — one that leaned openly on the fact that she was a foreigner and a Pole. Crowds gathered outside her house. In December, in the middle of it, the Nobel committee in Stockholm awarded her a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for the discovery of polonium and radium and the isolation of pure radium. She went and collected it. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

She had also, by then, got her laboratory. The Radium Institute — a joint creation of the University of Paris and the Institut Pasteur, the private research foundation for biology and medicine set up by Louis Pasteur, decided on in 1909 — was built on the rue d'Ulm in the 5th arrondissement and finished in July 1914: two laboratories side by side, hers for physics and chemistry, and one under the physician Claudius Regaud for the biological and medical effects of radiation. The pairing was deliberate — the point was to move a discovery from the bench to the patient — and it is the reason the Institut Curie, a cancer hospital and research centre in the same streets, carries the family name today.

The petites Curies

The buildings were barely finished when the war began. X-rays could show a surgeon exactly where a bullet or a shell fragment sat inside a wounded man, and in 1914 the French army had almost no radiological equipment near the front. Marie Curie spent four years fixing that: she raised the money and the vehicles through the Red Cross and the Patronage National aux Blessés — the National Fund for the Wounded, a French war charity — had eighteen cars fitted out as mobile X-ray units, trained women as radiological operators — her daughter Irène, then seventeen, among them — and travelled with a car of her own to Amiens, Calais, Dunkirk, Verdun, Nancy, Belfort, Compiègne. The vehicles were nicknamed the petites Curies, the 'little Curies', a name her younger daughter Ève put into print in the biography she later wrote of her mother. More than a million wounded men were examined by the technique.

Afterwards there was no money for research in a ruined country, and she went looking for it. An American journalist, Marie Mattingly Meloney, visited her in 1920, was astonished to find that the discoverer of radium could not afford to buy any of it for her own laboratory, and launched a subscription among American women; in May 1921 Curie sailed to the United States with both daughters and came home with a gram of radium presented by the American president, Warren Harding, along with instruments and funds. The Curie Foundation, created the same year to pay for the Institute's work, opened a clinic on the rue d'Ulm in 1922 offering the new radiation treatments for cancer. In 1922 she was elected to the Académie de médecine, France's national academy of medicine — the first woman elected to it — for a therapy that carried her name, curiethérapie: curietherapy, the treatment of tumours by placing radium against or inside them.

She kept an office at the Institute for the last twenty years of her life. Through the 1920s her health failed: she had spent three decades handling radioactive material with no protection anyone then knew to take, and her doctors diagnosed pernicious anaemia — a failure of the marrow to produce healthy red blood cells. She died on 4 July 1934 at a sanatorium, a mountain clinic for long convalescences, at Sancellemoz in the Haute-Savoie, in the French Alps, aged sixty-six. On 20 April 1995 the ashes of Pierre and Marie Curie were carried into the Panthéon, the domed former church on the hill above the Latin Quarter that France uses as a burial place for its national figures — making her the first woman moved there on the strength of her own achievements rather than a husband's. Her laboratory on the rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie is now the Musée Curie, and her office and chemistry laboratory are kept as she left them.