Why is marie curie a courageous scientist

But the film is lifeless. Occasionally she peers at the liquid in a beaker. And there is no chemistry, pun intended, between Marie and Paul, who conduct one of the most boring affairs ever put on film.

Gruszka, who like Marie is from Poland, might be more authentic, but give me Greer Garson any day. Another missed opportunity: Little Irene, played at age 15 by Rose Montron, is rarely in the film, without a memorable scene. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Marie worked as a governess until, at 24, she had saved enough money and purchased a train ticket to Paris, where she gravitated to the Latin Quarter and enrolled at the Sorbonne.

She immersed herself in French and math and made ends meet cleaning glassware in university labs. She rationed her intake of food until, on more than one occasion, she collapsed of weakness.

Science thrilled her, and she earned a degree in physics in and another in mathematics the following year. In , she met Pierre Curie, a year-old physicist at a French technical college who had been studying crystals and magnetism.

More than a decade before, he and his brother Jacques had discovered piezoelectricity, the electric charge produced in solid materials under pressure. They were married in in a civil service attended by family and a few friends. For the occasion, Marie donned a blue cotton dress, one practical enough to wear in the laboratory after the ceremony.

A difficult pregnancy had forced Marie to spend less time in the lab just as she was gathering data for a doctoral thesis. By the time her second daughter, Eve, was born in , Marie had grown accustomed to the disdain of colleagues who thought she spent too much time in the lab and not enough in the nursery.

Georges Sagnac, a friend and collaborator, eventually confronted her. But read scientific publications she did. In labs across Europe, scientists were studying new and surprising phenomena. Henri Becquerel was noting the emission of a different kind of mysterious rays, those from uranium salts. Thomson discovered negatively charged particles, which we now know as electrons and which we now know are the source of X-rays.

At first, she and other scientists were baffled about the source of the high-energy emissions. She wondered whether the emitted rays were violating a basic law of thermodynamics: the conservation of energy. Finally, she posited a daring hypothesis: The rays emitted might be a basic property of uranium atoms, which we now know to be subatomic particles released as the atoms decay. Her theory had radical implications. It further meant that atoms are not necessarily stable.

The device allowed her to measure extremely low electrical currents in air near mineral samples that contained uranium. She soon repeated the experiment with thorium, which behaved in similar ways. But she was puzzled by data that showed that the intensity of the radiation emitted by uranium and thorium was greater than expected based on the amounts of the elements she knew to be in her samples.

In she indeed identified one of the substances and named it polonium, after her homeland. Five months later, she identified a second element, which the world came to know as radium. Pierre put his crystals aside to help his wife isolate these radioactive elements and study their properties. Marie extracted pure radium salts from pitchblende, a highly radioactive ore obtained from mines in Bohemia.

The extraction required tons of the substance, which she dissolved in cauldrons of acid before obtaining barium sulphate and other alkalines, which she then purified and converted into chlorides. The separation of radium from the alkalines required thousands of tedious crystallizations. Working in a dilapidated shed with broken windows and poor ventilation, she nonetheless was able to make sensitive measurements.

It is remarkable, says Baisden, that Curie calculated the atomic weight of radium so accurately given such deplorable conditions. Both Curies were plagued by ailments—burns and fatigue—that, in retrospect, were clearly caused by repeated exposures to high doses of radiation. Both, too, were resistant to the suggestion that their research materials caused their ailments. In , Curie became the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics.

Maria spent her early years growing up in the boarding school that her devout Catholic mother ran. But when her mother died of tuberculosis, year-old Maria sought refuge by helping out her father in his laboratory. The quiet, rational world of pipettes and problem-solving was a far cry from the political turmoil outside. But when Maria turned 18, financial reality dragged her away from this safe haven.

She struck a deal with her sister, Bronya. But after just two years, her left-wing politics had garnered the attention of Big Brother. So, aged 24, Maria moved to Paris and changed her name to Marie. But Parisian labs and loves changed the course of her life forever. Finding work was also testing for a young girl in the maledominated world of science. Marie repeatedly tried to find a job in a lab, but kept being met with rejection. Eventually she was given the chance to carry out some trivial tasks.

But her technical proficiency immediately attracted attention, gaining the respect of her colleagues. It was while working in these labs that she met a certain scientist named Pierre Curie. Both passionate about science, both leftist and secular, love soon blossomed.

Listen: Jenni Murray discusses her new book, which tells the stories of some of the most fascinating women in global history. In Pierre, Marie found a fellow intellect and confidant, someone with whom she could enjoy both musing over scientific theories and sharing excursions on their bicycles. Love-struck Pierre volunteered to jack in his whole career and move to Poland with her. So the pair ended up marrying in in the suburbs of Paris, with untraditional Marie wearing a dark blue outfit instead of a bridal dress, which reportedly became one of her lab outfits.

Aided by a device that Pierre had invented, Marie set about solving the puzzle of these strange rays. This discovery was nothing short of revolutionary. The gruelling hours paid off. In June , Marie and Pierre extracted a black powder times more radioactive than uranium, calling their discovery polonium.

Marie was unashamedly open about the fact that her native Poland inspired the name. This was groundbreaking. No woman had ever won a Nobel Prize before. The committee had voted for Becquerel to receive half the prize, and Pierre the other half. So Pierre and Marie ended up both receiving a quarter of the prize. The Curies were the perfect match.