Marie Skłodowska-Curie, or simply Marie Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska (pronounced [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska] Listen) on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw (kingdom of Poland, under Russian domination) and died on July 4, 1934 in Passy, ​​in the sanatorium de Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), is a Polish physicist and chemist, naturalized French through her marriage to the physicist Pierre Curie in 1895.

In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie (1859-1906) shared with Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in physics for their research on radiation (radioactivity, natural corpuscular radiation). In 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on polonium and radium.

An exceptional scientist, she is the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize and, to date, the only woman to have received two. She remains the only person to have been rewarded in two distinct scientific fields1. She was also the first woman to win, with her husband, the Davy medal in 1903 for her work on radium2.

Part of his experience notebooks are kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and accessible in digital form3.

Maria Salomea Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, capital of the Kingdom of Poland, founded in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna for the benefit of Tsar Alexander and closely linked to the Russian Empire. At this time, following the Polish insurrection of 1861-1864, Russia transferred Polish ministries4 from Warsaw to Saint Petersburg and launched a policy of Russification of the kingdom5.

His father, from a noble family (Dołęga clan), is a professor of mathematics and physics; his mother is a teacher. Before Marie, they had three daughters and a son, Zofia (1861-1876), Józef (1863-1937), Bronisława (Bronia) (1865-1939)6 and Helena (1866-1961).

In the space of two years, she lost her sister Zofia, who died of typhus in January 1876, and her mother, who succumbed to tuberculosis on May 9, 1878. She then took refuge in studies where she excelled in all subjects, and where she was awarded the maximum mark7. She thus obtained her secondary school diploma with the gold medal in 1883. She adhered to the positivist doctrine of Auguste Comte and joined the Flying University, a clandestine organization which educated the masses in Polish, in reaction to the policy of Russification.

Marie Curie would like to pursue higher education, but this is prohibited for women in her native country. When her sister Bronia leaves for Paris to study medicine, Maria takes a job as a governess in a provincial family to finance a similar project. At this time, she intends to then return to Poland to teach, possibly as part of the Flying University. After three years, she returned to Warsaw, where a cousin allowed her to enter a laboratory8.
Higher studies in Paris (1891-1894)

Marie Curie left for Paris in 1891, where she was hosted by her sister and her brother-in-law, rue d'Allemand, not far from the Gare du Nord. On November 3, 1891, she registered to study physics at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris. Among the 776 students at the Faculty of Sciences in January 1895, there were only 27 women9, of which only seven were foreigners, whereas in medicine, most of the students were foreigners.

In Mars 1892, she moved to a furnished room on Rue Flatters in the Latin Quarter, quieter and closer to the faculty facilities. She took lessons from physicists Edmond Bouty and Gabriel Lippmann and mathematicians Paul Painlevé and Paul Appell.

In July 1893, she was placed first in her class for the physics license. During the summer, he was awarded a scholarship of 600 rubles, which allowed him to pursue studies in mathematics. In July 1894, she received second place in the mathematics degree. She then plans to return to Poland10.
Meeting and marriage with Pierre Curie

Since the beginning of 1894, she has also worked in the physical research laboratory of Gabriel Lippmann, in which the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry entrusted her with research into the magnetic properties of different steels. She works there in Spartan conditions and is therefore looking for a way to carry out her work. Professor Józef Kowalski of the University of Friborg then introduced him to Pierre Curie, head of physics work at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry who also studies magnetism. She ends up agreeing to work with him, and during this collaboration a mutual inclination develops between them.

Marie still returned to Warsaw in 1895, to be closer to her family and with the aim of teaching and participating in the emancipation of Poland. But when Pierre asked her to return to Paris and become his wife, she accepted: they married in Sceaux on July 26, 1895.

The following year, she prepared at the faculty for the aggregation for the teaching of young girls, mathematics section. At the same time, Marie Skłodowska, now Curie, took classes with Marcel Brillouin11[ref. incomplete] and documents his first research work on steels. In 1896, she was accepted first in the aggregation12. However, she did not take a position in secondary education, wishing to work on a doctoral thesis.

On September 12, 1897, she gave birth to her first daughter, Irene.
Doctoral thesis and discovery of radium
Doctoral thesis by Marie Curie.

The discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895 aroused great interest in the scientific community and gave rise to numerous research activities. On the other hand, the Becquerel rays, discovered by Henri Becquerel, have not yet aroused such enthusiasm. Marie Curie, who was then looking for a subject for her doctoral thesis, chose to devote herself to the study of this radiation. In 1897, she began her thesis work on the study of radiation produced by uranium, at that time still called uranium rays because they were known. At the end of 1909, Professor Émile Roux, director of the Pasteur Institute, proposed the creation of a Radium Institute, dedicated to medical research against cancer and its treatment by radiotherapy - this would later become the Institut Curie. Despite the notoriety of Marie Curie and her Nobel Prize, it was not until 1911 that work began, subsidized by Daniel Osiris. Professor Roux also imposes a directorial sharing, by bringing in one of his protégés, a biology researcher from Lyon, Doctor Claudius Regaud, who wants to undertake biological research into therapy against cancer, by crossing and mixing the use of radioactivity (radium) and radiography (X-rays, discovered by Roentgen).

Marie Curie, upset at being placed as a duplicate, demands that the would-be director-researcher, otherwise unknown to her, be subjected under her direction to a candidate examination, so that he can present the results of the work he has done. led so far and the motivations relating to this position. The Institute, located rue d'Ulm, was completed in 1914, just before the First World War. It brings together two laboratories with complementary skills: the physics and chemistry laboratory, directed by Marie Curie, and the Pasteur laboratory, focused on radiotherapy, directed by Claudius Regaud.

When the war broke out, Marie Curie mobilized, as did the other members of the Radium Institute, which closed temporarily during the war. Alongside Antoine Béclère, director of the army radiological service, and with the help of the Red Cross, she participated in the design of eighteen mobile surgical units, “radiological ambulances” subsequently nicknamed the “small Curies »34,35,36. She built the first mobile unit on her own initiative by borrowing and adapting the Princess de Polignac's car, taking Claudius Regaud's own research equipment without use, then inaugurated it in person with her experimental driver-laboratorian (Louis Ragot). a first campaign by visiting the hospitals of the front clogged with wounded37. What military slang referred to as "p'tites Curies", are passenger vehicles equipped with Röntgen devices with a dynamo powered by the vehicle's engine, and can therefore travel very close to the battlefields. and thus limit the medical movements of the injured. The vehicles make it possible to take x-rays of patients, a very useful operation for locating more precisely the location of shrapnel and bullets and facilitating surgical operation, either deferred or immediate under the x-ray device. Marie Curie transformed the deserted Radium Institute in August 1914 into a real radiology school, to train battalions of young female radiologist assistants38. She also participated in the creation of 150 fixed radiology positions within military hospitals.

In 1916, she obtained her driving license39 and regularly went to the front to take x-rays. She was joined by her daughter Irene, aged less than eighteen, who did the same in several field hospitals throughout the war.
The box set offered in 1921.

In November 1918, at the end of the war, Marie Curie was finally able to take up her position at the Radium Institute. His daughter Irene becomes his assistant. The Radium Institute faces financial difficulties. It was not until the early 1920s that donations poured in and the institute developed. After the discovery of the therapeutic virtues of radium for the fight against cancer, radium experienced a great literary and especially industrial craze, to the point of being used in numerous everyday consumer products — rejuvenating creams, cigarettes, alarm clocks, etc.

The Radium Institute welcomes many students and physicists, particularly foreign ones, including many women (Marguerite Perey was his assistant), and thus contributes to female emancipation in France and abroad40.

In 1921, journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney organized a collection of 100,000 US dollars (approximately one million gold francs) from American women so that Marie Curie could purchase a gram of radium for the institute. Marie Curie made her first trip to the United States on May 20, 1921, to buy a gram of radium from the Pittsburgh radium factory, where the processes she had developed were used industrially. In 1929, again thanks to American women, she received a new gram of radium, which she donated to the University of Warsaw.
Document signed by Marie Curie in the archives of the League of Nations41
Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.

In great demand, she traveled extensively, and became involved alongside Albert Einstein in the International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation.
Attachment to his Polish identity

Despite his French naturalization linked to his marriageUniversities, teaching, hospitals
Plaque placed at 10 rue Vauquelin in Paris.

    The Polish National Central Cancer Institute named Centrum Onkologii – Instytut im. Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie, in Warsaw (“Oncology Center - Marie Skłodowskiej-Curie Institute”52).
    The Soissons hospital in Aisne is named after Marie Sklodowska-Curie.
    The University of Paris 6, in France, is named Pierre-et-Marie-Curie University.
    The public university in Lublin, Poland is named Marie Curie-Skłodowska University. Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie53.
    In Poitiers, a university campus bears his name, near a street which also bears his name.
    The Marie Curie Fellowship Association54 is a program to support geographical mobility for young European researchers.
    In 2015, Marie Curie is the twelfth person