Marie Curie: Biography, Discoveries, Nobel Prizes and Death

Marie Curie (born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw on November 7, 1867; died in the French Alps on July 4, 1934) was the physicist and chemist who, working with her husband Pierre Curie, discovered the elements polonium and radium in 1898. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is still the only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences: Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911.

The rest of her story is less tidy than the headline facts. She left a country under foreign rule, studied in a Paris attic on bread and tea, lost her husband to a street accident at 38, drove X-ray vans to the front lines of World War I, and died of a blood disease that her doctors linked to decades of radiation exposure. This guide covers her early life and education, the discoveries, both Nobel Prizes, her war work, her death, her family and her legacy, with every date checked against the Nobel Foundation, the American Institute of Physics and Britannica.

Early life in Warsaw: who was Marie Curie before Paris?

Maria Salomea Skłodowska grew up in Warsaw, which at the time belonged to the part of Poland ruled by the Russian Empire. Her father taught mathematics and physics at a secondary school, and her first scientific training came from him. Polish children were schooled under Russian rules, and teaching in Polish was restricted, which shaped the household's quiet patriotism.

She was an exceptional student. Britannica records that she had a prodigious memory and that, at 16, she finished secondary school at the Russian lycée with a gold medal. University was another matter: women could not enroll at the university in Warsaw. Her father had also lost his savings through a bad investment, so Maria went to work as a teacher and governess.

At the same time she attended the clandestine "free university," an underground network of classes held in private homes, and read in Polish to women workers. According to the Nobel Foundation's biography, her involvement with a student revolutionary group made it prudent to leave Warsaw for a period. She struck a deal with her older sister Bronisława: Maria would fund Bronisława's medical studies in Paris from her governess wages, and Bronisława would later help her in return.

Marie Curie's education at the Sorbonne

In 1891 she finally reached Paris, enrolled at the Sorbonne and began using the French form of her name, Marie. She lived in a cold student garret and, as Britannica puts it, virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. The work paid off quickly:

• 1893: she placed first in the licence (degree) in physical sciences.
• 1894: she placed second in the licence in mathematical sciences.
• Spring 1894: while working in Gabriel Lippmann's research laboratory, she met Pierre Curie, then a professor at the School of Physics in Paris.

They married on July 25, 1895, and spent their honeymoon on a bicycle trip through the French countryside. Their partnership, personal and scientific, would produce some of the most important results in the history of physics.

Marie Curie's discoveries: polonium, radium and the word "radioactivity"

In 1896 the French physicist Henri Becquerel found that uranium salts gave off mysterious rays without any outside source of energy. Marie Curie, looking for a doctoral subject, decided to investigate whether other materials did the same. Using a sensitive electrometer, she measured the faint electric currents the rays produced in air.

Her measurements led to several conclusions that changed physics:

1. Thorium also emits rays. She found this at about the same time as the German chemist G. C. Schmidt.
2. The activity depended on the amount of the element, not on its chemical form. That pointed to something happening inside the atom itself, not to a chemical reaction.
3. Pitchblende, a uranium ore, was more active than pure uranium. The only explanation was an unknown substance, present in tiny quantities, that was far more active than uranium.

Pierre set aside his own research to join her. In the summer of 1898 they announced a new element, which Marie named polonium after her homeland, a country that did not then exist on the map. A few months later, in December 1898, they announced a second element: radium. Marie Curie also coined the term "radioactivity" for the phenomenon she was measuring.

Isolating radium: four years of heavy labor

Announcing an element and proving it are different things. Chemists wanted to see a pure sample and measure its atomic weight. Radium exists in pitchblende in minute traces, so the Curies processed tons of ore residues in a poorly equipped shed next to Pierre's school. Marie did much of the heavy chemistry herself, stirring boiling vats and running thousands of crystallizations.

By 1902 she had isolated a decigram of radium chloride and measured radium's atomic weight. Pure metallic radium came later, in 1910, achieved with the chemist André-Louis Debierne. Pierre, meanwhile, concentrated on the physics of the new radiation, including its effects on living tissue. In June 1903 Marie received her doctorate of science for this work, the same year the couple received the Royal Society's Davy Medal.

Marie Curie's Nobel Prizes: 1903 and 1911

Marie Curie's two Nobel Prizes recognized different achievements, and the official citations, published by the Nobel Foundation, make the distinction clear.

Year	Prize	Shared with	What it recognized (official citation, summarized)
1903	Physics	Pierre Curie (jointly, one half); Henri Becquerel (other half)	Their joint research on the radiation phenomena discovered by Becquerel
1911	Chemistry	No one (sole laureate)	The discovery of radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of its nature and compounds
1935	Chemistry (her daughter)	Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot	Their synthesis of new radioactive elements

The 1903 prize made Marie Curie the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. The 1911 prize made her the first person to win two, and she remains the only person honored in two different scientific fields. Linus Pauling later won Chemistry and Peace, and John Bardeen won Physics twice, but no one else has matched her two-science combination.

The 1911 award came at a painful time. In the same year, the French press attacked her over her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin, who was married, and she had narrowly failed to win election to the French Academy of Sciences. She traveled to Stockholm anyway and delivered her Nobel lecture.

Marie Curie's husband Pierre and the year everything changed

On Thursday, April 19, 1906, Pierre Curie hurried across a rainy Paris street and was run over by a heavy horse-drawn wagon. The American Institute of Physics, drawing on family archives, notes that the wagon was carrying military uniforms and weighed about six tons. He was killed instantly at 46.

Marie was left with two daughters, Irène, then 8, and Ève, 14 months old. She refused a state pension. Within weeks, on May 13, 1906, the Sorbonne offered her Pierre's professorship. She accepted, becoming the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne, and in 1908 she was made a full (titular) professor. Her own words, quoted by the AIP, explain why she kept going:

"Crushed by the blow, I did not feel able to face the future. I could not forget, however, what my husband used to say, that even deprived of him, I ought to continue my work."

In 1910 she published her two-volume Traité de radioactivité, a foundational textbook of the field. In 1914 the Radium Institute of the University of Paris was completed, with a laboratory she directed. Its Curie Pavilion, built between 1912 and 1915, is the building that now houses the Musée Curie.

Marie Curie in World War I: the "petites Curies"

When Germany declared war on France in August 1914, the Radium Institute's researchers were drafted. Curie looked for another way to help. She realized that X-rays could save lives by showing surgeons where bullets and shrapnel had lodged and where bones were broken, yet most field hospitals had no X-ray equipment at all.

First she secured France's entire research stock of radium, a single gram, by carrying it in a lead-lined box on a government train to a bank vault in Bordeaux. Then she went back to Paris and got to work. According to the AIP's history of her war years:

• She became Director of the Red Cross Radiology Service and persuaded wealthy acquaintances to donate cars, and manufacturers to donate equipment.
• By late October 1914 the first of 20 radiology vehicles she would equip was ready. French soldiers nicknamed them petites Curies, "little Curies."
• She also helped set up about 200 fixed radiology units in hospitals.
• She learned to drive, studied anatomy and auto mechanics, and took her 17-year-old daughter Irène to the front as her assistant.
• From 1916 she trained about 150 women as X-ray technicians at the Radium Institute.

She also collected radon gas from her radium every 48 hours, sealed it in small glass tubes and sent them to hospitals for radiation treatment. She offered her Nobel medals to the government's gold collection drive (the national bank declined them) and put most of her prize money into war bonds. In a letter to Paul Langevin dated January 1, 1915, she wrote: "I am resolved to put all my strength at the service of my adopted country, since I cannot do anything for my unfortunate native country just now." After the war she summed up the results: "The use of the X-rays during the war saved the lives of many wounded men; it also saved many from long suffering and lasting infirmity." Both quotations come from the AIP's Curie archive exhibit.

After the war: radium for medicine and two trips to America

From 1919 Curie ran the Radium Institute, which became a world center for nuclear physics and chemistry. She focused on the chemistry of radioactive substances and their medical uses, and in 1922 she joined the French Academy of Medicine. That same year she became a member of the League of Nations' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.

Radium was expensive and her lab was short of it. In 1921 an American journalist, Marie Mattingly Meloney, organized a fundraising campaign among American women, and President Warren G. Harding presented Curie with one gram of radium at the White House. In 1929, on a second US visit, President Herbert Hoover gave her a gift of $50,000 raised by American friends of science to buy radium for a new institute in Warsaw. The Warsaw Radium Institute opened in 1932, with her sister Bronisława as director.

Britannica highlights one of her less visible achievements: she understood the need to build up strong radioactive sources for research. The Radium Institute's stock of about 1.5 grams of radium, and the polonium that accumulated with it, became a key resource for the experiments of the early 1930s.

Marie Curie's death: radiation and aplastic anemia

Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, at a sanatorium in the Savoy region of the French Alps, near Sallanches. She was 66. Britannica gives the cause as aplastic anemia, a condition in which the bone marrow stops producing enough blood cells, caused by radiation exposure from her experiments and from her wartime X-ray work.

The dangers of radiation were not understood when she began. She and Pierre handled radium and its residues for years with no protection beyond ordinary lab practice. The AIP notes that during the war she and Irène worked with inadequate shielding.

She was buried beside Pierre at Sceaux, outside Paris. In 1995 both were reinterred in the Panthéon in Paris. Britannica records that she was the first woman to be honored there for her own achievements.

Marie Curie's family: Irène Joliot-Curie, Ève Curie and five Nobel Prizes

The Curie family has an unmatched Nobel record. The Musée Curie calls it "the family of five Nobel Prizes": two for Marie, one for Pierre, and one each for their daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot.

Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956)

Irène worked beside her mother at the front at 17, joined the Radium Institute staff and married the physicist Frédéric Joliot in 1926. In 1934 the couple discovered artificial radioactivity: they turned stable elements into radioactive ones by bombarding them with alpha particles. Marie Curie lived to see the discovery, a few months before her death. The pair won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements," according to the Nobel Foundation.

Ève Curie (1904–2007)

The younger daughter chose a different path. Ève became a pianist, journalist and writer, and her 1937 biography Madame Curie became an international bestseller and the best-known Marie Curie book for generations of readers. Her husband, Henry Labouisse, later accepted the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF, which he led.

Date	Event
November 7, 1867	Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw
1891	Moves to Paris and enrolls at the Sorbonne
July 25, 1895	Marries Pierre Curie
1897	Daughter Irène born
1898	Announces polonium (summer) and radium (December) with Pierre
June 1903	Doctorate of science; Nobel Prize in Physics follows in December
1904	Daughter Ève born
April 19, 1906	Pierre Curie killed in a street accident
May 13, 1906	Appointed to Pierre's Sorbonne chair
1911	Nobel Prize in Chemistry
1914–1918	Runs mobile and fixed X-ray services for the French army
1921 and 1929	US visits; gifts of radium and funds from Presidents Harding and Hoover
July 4, 1934	Dies of aplastic anemia in Savoy, France
1995	Remains moved to the Panthéon in Paris

Legacy: what Marie Curie gave the world

Her work changed several fields at once. Showing that radioactivity is an atomic property helped open the door to nuclear physics, and Britannica notes that her influence, through her own results and through the generation she trained, paved the way for the discovery of the neutron and of artificial radioactivity. Radium therapy was an early form of the radiation treatment used against cancer today.

Her name lives on in several places:

• The Curie Institute in Paris, the successor to the Radium Institute and the Curie Foundation, which remains a major cancer research and treatment center.
• The Musée Curie, housed in her last laboratory in the Curie Pavilion, which preserves her office and lab.
• The element curium (atomic number 96) and the old unit of radioactivity, the curie, both named in honor of Marie and Pierre.
• The Maria Skłodowska-Curie Institute of Oncology in Warsaw, which grew from the Radium Institute she helped found.

She also left a record of how science gets done: careful measurement, unglamorous labor and a refusal to patent the radium-isolation process, which she and Pierre published openly so others could use it. For more profiles of researchers who changed how we live, browse our science section, and for more life stories visit the celebrities and biographies hub.

Marie Curie facts at a glance

• Her birth name was Maria Salomea Skłodowska; "Marie" is the French form she adopted in Paris.
• She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (1903) and the first person to win two (1911).
• She named polonium after Poland, which at the time was divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria.
• Her books include Recherches sur les substances radioactives (1904), Traité de radioactivité (1910), Radiology in War (1919) and a biography of Pierre Curie.
• She was a member of the Solvay physics council from 1911 until her death.
• She refused a state pension after Pierre died, insisting she could support her children herself.