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Madame Curie's Polish maiden name was Manya Sklodowska. She was born in Warsaw on 7 November 1867, at a time when Poland was under Russian domination after the unsuccessful revolt of 1863. Her parents were teachers and soon after Manya was born - their fifth child - they lost their teaching posts and had to take in boarders. Their young daughter worked long hours helping with the meals, but nevertheless won a medal for excellence at the local high school, where the examinations were held in Russian. No higher education was available so Manya took a job as a governess, sending part of her savings to Paris to help to pay for her elder sister's medical studies. Her sister qualified and married a fellow doctor in 1891 and Manya went to join them in Paris. She entered the Sorbonne and studied physics and mathematics, graduating top of her class. In 1894 she met the French chemist Pierre Curie and they were married the following year.

Pierre Curie was born in Paris on 15 May 1859, the son of a doctor. He was educated privately and at the Sorbonne, becoming an assistant there in 1878. He discovered the piezoelectric effect and, after being appointed head of the laboratory of the École de Physique et Chimie, went on to study magnetism and formulate Curie's law (which states that magnetic susceptibility is inversely proportional to absolute temperature). In 1895 he discovered the Curie point, the critical temperature at which a paramagnetic substance become ferromagnetic. In the same year he married Manya Sklodowska.

From 1896 the Curies worked together on radioactivity, building on the results of Wilhelm Röntgen (who had discovered X-rays) and Henri Becquerel (who had discovered that similar rays are emitted by uranium salts). Madame Curie discovered that thorium also emits radiation and found that the mineral pitchblende was even more radioactive than could be accounted for by any uranium and thorium content. The Curies then carried out an exhaustive search and in July 1898 announced the discovery of polonium, followed in December of that year with the discovery of radium. They eventually prepared 1 g/0.04 oz of pure radium chloride - from 8 tonnes of waste pitchblende from Austria. They also established that beta-rays (now known to consist of electrons) are negatively charged particles.

In 1906 Pierre Curie was run down and killed by a horse-drawn carriage. Marie took over his post at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to teach there, and concentrated all her energies into research and caring for her daughters (one of whom, Irène, was to later marry Frédéric Joliot and become a famous scientist and Nobel prizewinner). In 1910 with André Debierne (1874-1949), who in 1899 had discovered actinium in pitchblende, she isolated pure radium metal.

At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Madame Curie helped to equip ambulances with X-ray equipment, which she drove to the front lines. The International Red Cross made her head of its Radiological Service. Assisted by Irène Curie and Martha Klein at the Radium Institute she held courses for medical orderlies and doctors, teaching them how to use the new technique. By the late 1920s her health began to deteriorate: continued exposure to high-energy radiation had given her leukaemia. She entered a sanatorium at Haute Savoie and died there on 4 July 1934, a few months after her daughter and son-in-law, the Joliot-Curies, had announced the discovery of artifical radioactivity.

Throughout much of her life Marie Curie was poor and the painstaking radium extractions were carried out in primitive conditions. The Curies refused to patent any of their discoveries, wanting them freely to benefit everyone. The Nobel prize money and other financial rewards were used to finance further research. One of the outstanding applications of their work has been the use of radiation to treat cancer, one form of which cost Marie Curie her life.

Author not available, Curie, Marie (1867-1934). , The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 01-01-1998.

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