100th Anniversary of the Discovery of Polonium and Radium

In 1998 we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of polonium and radium by the Polish scientist, Marie Sklodowska-Curie. Last year's Pulaski Day Parade commemorated this event.

Maria Sklodowska-Curie's discoveries were epoch-making. Radium's enormous radioactivity seemed to contradict the principle of the conservation of energy and forced a reconsideration of the foundation of physics. Extraction of radium provided scientists with sources of radioactivity with which they could probe the structure of the matter. Maria Sklodowska-Curie was the person who opened the door to nuclear physics, radiation chemistry, radiation biology and radiation medicine. Quantum and relativistic theories, discoveries like the structure of the atom and elementary particles, led to many practical applications such as usage of atomic energy, cancer treatment and radioactive bioindicators. She was the only person ever to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in both physics and chemistry.

Maria Sklodowska-Curie, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize and the only woman of four individuals to receive the Nobel Prize two times, was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867, the youngest of five children. Her youth was deeply affected by the oppression of her native country. Beginning in 1772, Poland was partitioned among three powerful neighbors: Russia, Prussia and Austria. Warsaw remained under cruel and despotic Russian domination. Polish language, culture, and science, as well as politics, were repressed. Sklodowska's family was very patriotic and had lost much of its land and wealth as punishment for participating in the great Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863. As a result, both Maria's parents earned a modest living as teachers.

Maria's early childhood was darkened by loss. When she was nine, her oldest sister died of typhus; two years later her mother passed away of tuberculosis. But Maria's father, Bronislaw Sklodowski, carried on the mother's ideals: a passionate belief in education and a deep commitment to the cause of Polish independence. He read patriotic poetry to children in secret, and never missed an opportunity to educate them. Although they had to learn in the Russian language, all Sklodowski's children succeeded brilliantly as students. Like her older siblings, Maria graduated from the gymnasium with highest honors.

Unfortunately, under the Russian domination there was no way in which a woman could receive any form of higher education in Poland. Maria decided to follow her elder sister, who studied medicine in Paris, and went to France to pursue her main interest, science.

As a woman student at the Sorbonne in 1891, Maria benefited from the training in independence she received in Poland. From early on, she had been taught to resist authority and to stand up for what was right. And as always, she proved to be an outstanding student. In 1893, she graduated in physics, taking first place. The following year she graduated in second position in mathematics. That same year, she met a shy scientist, Pierre Curie, an unconventional man who greatly admired her independence of spirit. Until they met, she had every intention of returning to Poland to teach and work. But Pierre insisted that she not go back and Maria came to the conclusion that she could not leave him. "It is a sorrow for me to have to stay forever in Paris," she wrote to a Polish friend, "but what am I to do? Fate has made us deeply attached to each other and we cannot endure the idea of separating." In 1895, Maria Sklodowska married Pierre Curie.

The marriage proved fruitful in many ways. With Pierre's encouragement, Marie (as she was known in France) decided to pursue a doctorate and to take up a puzzling observation made by Henri Becquerel, who had detected a strange energy emanating from uranium. She discovered that the emanation of energy was not unique to uranium, but was present at much higher levels in other minerals, for instance in pitchblende.

From this Marie discovered the presence of two previously unknown elements. She named the first --Polonium, after her native Poland, and the second -- Radium. Even more importantly, working together with her husband, she identified the phenomenon common to all these elements, which she and Pierre named radioactivity. Their discovery enabled other scientists to understand the structure of matter. It took Marie almost four more years of hard work in their poorly equipped, primitive laboratory to extract, in 1902, first decigram of radium from tons of pitchblende, and to measure its atomic weight (her result, 225, was very close to the current agreed value of 226 for radium). "I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself" -- she recalled. -- "I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end. Other days, on the contrary, the work would be a most minute and delicate fractional crystallization, in the effort to concentrate the radium. I was then annoyed by the floating dust of iron and coal from which I could not protect my precious products."

In 1903, she defended her doctorate, "Studies on radioactive materials," signed in her full name: M. Sklodowska-Curie. Also in 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie, jointly with Henri Becquerel, received the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on radioactivity.

During those same years, the Curies had two children. Irene, born in 1897, became an important scientist in her own right, winning the Nobel Prize in 1935 with her husband Frederic Joliot. Eve Curie, born seven years later, has lived a long and productive life, first as a concert pianist and then as writer.

The marriage ended tragically in 1906, when Pierre was killed at age 47 in a street accident in Paris. It took Marie a very long time to recover from this loss. After her husband's death, she was appointed to fill his vacant chair at the Sorbonne as the first woman in history to teach there. Two years later, the first woman in France to do so, she received professorial rank. It was also a turning point in her career -- she focused all her energy on completing alone the scientific work on radioactive materials that she and Pierre had undertaken. It resulted in her being awarded a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in the field of chemistry, for isolating radium and studying its nature and atomic make-up.

During World War I, Marie Sklodowska-Curie's campaign to send automobiles outfitted with X-Ray equipment nearer the front lines all over France and Belgium, saved many lives. After the war, she became a world-renowned figure. She travelled twice to the United States, in 1921 and 1929, to raise money for her laboratory and to equip a Radium Institute in Warsaw, the second institution after the Paris Radium Institute, designed by her to make use of radioactivity in medical treatment. She also worked for international scientific co-operation on a committee of the League of Nations.

During her lifetime Maria Sklodowska-Curie received a great number of honorary degrees, medals and decorations from universities and scholarly institutions around the world, including the United States. She died at age 67, in 1934, of leukaemia related to years of exposure to radioactivity. Sixty-one years later, Maria Sklodowska-Curie's remains were transferred to the most prestigious final resting-place in France, the Pantheon in Paris.

Courtesy of the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C.