MARIE SKLODOVSKA - CURIE (7.XI.1867 - 4.VII.1943)

She was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw. She graduated the Warsaw high school in 1884 with gold medal and worked for some time as a governess in rich bourgeois families. In the period of 1891-1894 she studied in the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the University of Paris and graduated it with two diplomas – in Physics and Mathematics. In 1895 she married the French physicist Pierre Curie and started working in his laboratory in the Higher School of Physics and Chemistry ( Paris). In 1903 she defended a doctoral thesis in the University of Paris on " Study of radioactive substances”. In 1906 she became a Professor in the Parisian university and head of the department that Pierre Curie used to hold the chair of before. In 1914 she became principal of the Radium Institute .

Her scientific researches are in the area of radioactivity and its application. Since 1 897 she began studying radiation which had been discovered in 1896 by the French physicist Antoine Anrie Becquerel , and during the same year she came to the conclusion that the radiation of the uranium salts is a property of the very uranium atoms. During the next 1898 year Maria Sklodovska-Curie proved the presence of radioactivity in Thorium (Th ), pointing out that the radioactivity of some minerals containing Uranium (U) and Thorium (Th) is much higher than could be expected. She supposed that these minerals contain a new highly radioactive element different from Uranium and Thorium. She searched for this hypothetic element together with Pierre Curie. As a result of their intensive and patient work in July 1898 they discovered one of these elements – Polonium, Po, and in December the same year they discovered a second element – Radium, Ra.

In 1902 Marie Sklodovska-Curie extracted few decigrams pure radium salt, and in 1910 – metal radium. She defined the atomic weight of the Radium and its place in the periodic system. In 1903 the Curies together with Antoine Anrie Becquerel were awarded with the Nobel Prize in physics for their researches on radioactivity, and in 1911 Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the derivation of metal radium. The Curie spouses renounced the material reward for the discovery of radium and did not patent it although they didn't have at their disposal even a small physical laboratory and the necessary conditions for scientific work (they made their glorious discovery in an old warehouse).

Marie Curie examined the radioactivity of many elements, studied their characteristics , developed the main principals of quantitative methods of radioactive measuring , studied channeled radioactivity , and discovered the influence of radioactive rays on the living cell. She was the first to use radioactivity ( radium emanation ) in medicine, she introduced the term "radioactivity" and so forth. During the years of the First World War (1914 - 1918) she organized the use of about 220 mobile and stationary x-ray apparatuses for x-ray and radiological services in the French hospitals.

The remarkable discoveries of Marie Sklodovska-Curie and Pierre Curie marked the beginning of a new era – the use of nuclear energy. She was member of many scientific academies and associations. She died of leukemia on 4 July 1943.