Adventures of a Fulfilled Scientist

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It is difficult to reconcile the version that History has handed down to us of Marie Curie - austere and perfectionist, bent over the laboratory table in a shabby black dress - with the image of a child with eyes wide open in wonder. Yet these and many other souls coexisted in the first scientist Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911 (between only two people to have received two in different disciplines), forced to challenge prejudices of all kinds, while fighting a personal battle against depression.
Fragility and genius were aspects finely intertwined in the life of Polish chemistry and physics, whose existence, reinterpreted beyond the myth, appears surprisingly modern.

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THE EARLY YEARS

Marya Salomee Sklodowska known as Manya was born in Warsaw on November 7th 1867, the last of 5 brothers, by two teachers: Wladyslaw and Bronislava. Poland is controlled by Russia: Russian soldiers patrol schools and, for girls, higher education is practically a mirage. But the child has the stuff to learn, and from her father Wladyslaw learns the passion for research, for physics and chemistry.
Meanwhile, her mother became ill and, in 1874, died of typhus, closely followed by Zosia, Marie's eldest sister. The double mourning deeply marks the child, raised according to Catholic education, while it slips into a grim sadness.

FINALLY PARIS

Comfort comes from books. Marie completes high school and makes a deal with her sister Bronya, three years older: she will work as a housekeeper to keep Bronya in medical school in Paris, and after graduating, her sister will do the same for her. The exchange works and at 24, without knowing a word of French, Marie arrives at the Sorbonne.
Her new home is an attic of the Latin Quarter, on the sixth floor and without heater. She survives with very little: a little bread, fruit, tea and chocolate, a pile of clothes under which to sleep so as not to freeze. She is malnourished and fainting for hardship, but she is obsessed with studying, and within three years she graduates in physics and mathematics at the Sorbonne. The plan is to graduate as a teacher and return to Warsaw.

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PIERRE

To make ends meet, Marie gets a scholarship from the University on how to trace the magnetic properties of the various steels. The equipment is cumbersome and requires space, so someone by the name of Pierre Curie , a physicist familiar with the laws of magnetism. Pierre has place in the laboratory, but that meeting will forever change the lives of both.

Pierre Curie, 8 years older than Marie, an internationally renowned scientist, is an outsider in the academic world, interested in research rather than titles and prestige. He earns his living as head of laboratory of the School of Physics and Industrial Chemistry in Paris and has already undertook with his brother Jacques an important discovery: that of piezoelectricity (an electrical potential that is generated when crystals are compressed).

A LOT IN COMMON

The two fall in love, but Marie does not give in to distractions: she planned to graduate and return to Poland, it will not be a man who will change her mind. But when Pierre also says he is willing to follow her to Warsaw. The couple marries with a simple ceremony in Sceaux, France, in 1895, and as a gift receives two bicycles with which they leave for a three-month sabbatical tour around Europe.
Marie gives Pierre a new ambition, and in return receives an absolute understanding of the central value that science has in her life. Both voted for isolation, they begin in Paris an existence in symbiosis, withdrawn and punctuated by work.

Pierre wrote at that time
"we dreamed of living in a world quite remote from human beings ..."

THE MYSTERIOUS "RAYS OF URANIUM".

In 1897, at the age of 30, Marie gave birth to a child, Irene, of whom she meticulously records every datum of development, as in an experiment. Entrusted the child to the care of Pierre's father, focuses on the almost forgotten work of Henri Becquerel : in 1896, while studying the phosphorescence of uranium salts, the French physicist realized that the material emitted rays capable of impressing a photographic plate , even without the need for help from sunlight.

Marie chooses to study the phenomenon using an instrument developed and perfected by Pierre: the electrometer , able to measure weak electric currents. Which is a systematic analysis of uranium in various compounds and in different conditions, which leads to a first, extraordinary conclusion: the emission of radiation is an atomic property of the uranium element (which Marie call radioactivity) that cannot be modified by any chemical procedure.
But if the atom emanates radiation, then it can not be indivisible : centuries of philosophical convictions crumble in what many will call one of the most important conceptual contributions in the history of physics.

NEW RADIATION SOURCES

Scrupulous measurements also show that to be radioactive are not only uranium and its compounds but also thorium and a raw mineral that contains both: the pitcher , long known to the German miners. This is much more radioactive than justified by the amount of uranium and thorium it contains: there must then be another unknown radioactive component.
In the summer of 1898, Marie and Pierre (who rushed headlong into his wife's studies) wrote that they had identified a substance 300 times more active than uranium:

"We believe that the substance we extracted from pechblenda contains a metal that has never been identified before. ... we suggest calling it Polonius , from the name of the country of origin of one of us.”

In December of the same year, the Curies inform the Academy of Sciences that they have discovered another substance, with a radioactivity 900 times greater than that of uranium, and a spectral line never observed before: it was that of radio (Ra).
Only one year has passed since the beginning of the research. As Barbara Goldsmith writes in Obsessive Genius: the inner world of Marie Curie.

A TEMPLE OF RESEARCH

It is now necessary to measure the atomic weight of the new elements, but to do so they need enormous quantities of the expensive pitchblock, and a space suitable for working it. After many doors in the face the couple get an abandoned shed not far from the laboratory, which turned out to be the setting for a happy and productive era. In the crumbling structure, among the radioactive fumes of the minerals, Marie took care of the chemical separation of the distillates, stirring for hours boiling pans with 20 kg of material at a time.

After four years of exhausting work and 10 tons of worked pechblende residues, Marie had obtained a quality of pure radio resembling a few grains of sand . In June 1903, in her doctoral thesis, She finally presented the atomic weight to the world: 225, an almost exact measure.

UNWANTED ATTENTION

The Nobel Prize in Physics for research on radioactive phenomena arrives in 1903 - halfway with Becquerel - as a bomb: the relationship between Pierre and Marie and the figure of the fragile scientist capable of extracting a "magical" element are like honey for printing , which besieges the two solitary scientists. The Curies, convinced of the value that radio can have for society, have chosen not to patent the discovery, making it the most sought after in the medical and industrial fields. Their fame is now international: it is the end of the "hard and pure" research isolated in the shed.

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THE DARKEST DAY

On April 19, 1906, while crossing the road on a rainy day, Pierre Curie slipped and was hit and killed by a cart near Pont Neuf, in Paris. Marie remains alone with her daughters Irene and Eve, aged 9 and 2. At 38, as a widow, she became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne: not for personal merits, but because she "inherited" her husband's place. Her first lesson begins where Pierre's last was over.
Marie closes in silence, holing up in the laboratory until late at night. She delegates the care of her daughters to Pierre's father.

LEGACY

In the last years of her life, Marie pass the baton to her daughter Irene and her son-in-law Frederic: she live long enough to see them discover the artificial radioactivity. On 4 April 1934, at age 67, she died of aplastic anemia: her bone marrow can no longer function because it is damaged by the long accumulation of radiation. She was buried in Sceaux next to Pierre.

It is clear she was betrayed by her own invention.