The Polish-French Physicist Who Won Two Nobel Prizes and Was Killed by Her Own Discovery

Marie Skłodowska Curie (1867–1934) was born to a Polish-patriot intelligentsia family in Warsaw, under Russian imperial occupation. She emigrated to Paris in 1891 (aged 24) to study at the Sorbonne, married the French physicist Pierre Curie in 1895, and began doctoral research in 1897 on the newly-discovered phenomenon that Henri Becquerel had observed the previous year: uranium compounds spontaneously emit penetrating radiation.

Marie and Pierre worked in a unheated shed at the École de Physique et Chimie Industrielles on the rue Lhomond. Through systematic processing of approximately one ton of pitchblende ore — manual labour, in successive precipitations and crystallisations — they isolated two new chemical elements: polonium (named for Marie’s occupied homeland, July 1898) and radium (December 1898). The radioactive intensity of the radium they isolated was approximately a million times that of uranium.

The Nobel Prizes

The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded jointly to Becquerel, Pierre Curie, and Marie Curie for the discovery and characterisation of radioactivity. The Nobel committee had initially omitted Marie from the citation; Pierre had refused to accept the prize unless his wife was included. The 1903 award made Marie the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in any category.

Pierre was killed in April 1906 by a Paris dray-cart accident — crushed by a horse-drawn vehicle while crossing the rue Dauphine. He was 46. Marie continued the radium-research programme alone. The 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to her alone for the isolation of pure metallic radium. She remains the only person ever to have won Nobel Prizes in two separate scientific categories.

What the radium did to her

Marie’s hands were visibly scarred by the radium burns by 1910. She experienced chronic fatigue, recurring fevers, cataracts, and progressive bone marrow damage through the subsequent two decades. Modern medical-historical reconstruction attributes the symptoms to cumulative ionising-radiation exposure exceeding any modern occupational-safety standard by approximately five orders of magnitude.

She died on 4 July 1934 at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in the French Alps. The diagnosis was aplastic anaemia — irreversible destruction of the bone marrow’s blood-cell-producing capacity. She was 66.

The laboratory notebooks she had used through her forty-year radium career are still radioactive. They are kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in lead-lined boxes. Researchers wishing to examine them must sign a radiation-exposure waiver and work in protective equipment. The predicted half-life of the notebook radioactivity is approximately 1,600 years.

Marie’s daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for artificial radioactivity, with her husband Frédéric Joliot). She died of leukaemia in March 1956, aged 58 — from the same long-term radium and polonium exposure that had killed her mother.