For the rest of the month, I’m going to tell y’all about my women heroes. I’m starting with Marie Curie because I’ve been fascinated by her since I was in elementary school.
Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in Physics, and with her later win, in Chemistry, she became the first person to claim Nobel honors twice. Her efforts with her husband Pierre led to the discovery of polonium and radium, and she championed the development of X-rays.
She was born Maria Sklodowska in what is now modern-day Poland. Her parents were math and physics teachers and Maria took after them. She could not attend the male-only University of Warsaw. She instead continued her education in Warsaw’s “floating university,” a set of underground, informal classes held in secret.
After a few years of tutoring and working as a governess, Maria changed her name to Marie and enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris. While at the Sorbonne, with little money, she lived on buttered bread and tea. She met Pierre Curie through a friend and He just happened to have a lab in which she could conduct her experiments on steel and magnetic properties.
Marie and Pierre had all kinds of chemistry (and physics) and we’re married and had two daughters all while doing earth-shattering science work. It’s almost criminal that they only had ten years together, as Pierre accidentally stepped in front of a horse-drawn carriage and died in 1905.
After his death, Marie took over her husband’s teaching post at the Sorbonne, becoming the institution’s first female professor. How many “firsts” is that? Marie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia likely caused by exposure to radiation.
It was her discovery that paved the way towards evolution in medicine and the development of atomic bombs. We owe so much to Marie Curie. That is an enormous understatement. I
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