Maria “Manya” Sklodowska (1867-1934) was born in Warsaw, then a part of Poland under the occupation of the Russian Empire. As a child she was encouraged to seek a higher education by her mother, a math teacher, and her father, a physics teacher, and eventually she was able to attend the Floating University, an illegal night school in Warsaw. Working as a tutor and as a governess for children of wealthy families while studying math­ematics and chemistry, Manya was eventually able to gain acceptance to the prestigious Sorbonne. In 1891, she moved to Paris and changed her name to Marie, to fit into the French culture, as she applied herself dili­gently to her studies in math and physics.

By 1894, Marie had performed pioneering research on magnetism and steel, and she was the laboratory chief at the Municipal School of Indus­trial Physics and Chemistry in Paris, where she shared laboratory space with a like-minded scientist named Pierre Curie (1859-1906). In July 1895, the two scientists were married, and Marie Sklodowska became Marie Curie. The research work of Marie and Pierre Curie was performed in a barely adequate structure in Paris, fondly referred to as “the miserable old shed,” with minimum funding, and yet they were able to steer the course of atomic science and be awarded three Nobel Prizes between them. Marie was the first person to win Nobel recognition in two different sciences, physics and chemistry. The 1903 Nobel Prize in physics was shared by Marie, Pierre, and Marie’s doctoral thesis adviser, Henri Becquerel.

In 1896, Becquerel’s newly discovered rays were considered interesting by the scientific community, but much more attention was focused on Wilhelm Roentgen’s X-rays. Marie found the neglected rays from ura­nium interesting, and she used a new technique to detect and quantify them. A precision electrometer had been invented 15 years earlier by her husband, Pierre, and his brother, Jacques. She used it to measure the ion­ization effect in air caused by the passage of Becquerel rays. Using this novel equipment setup, she was able to confirm Becquerel’s observations that the radiation from uranium is constant, regardless of whether the uranium was solid or pulverized, pure or in a compound, wet or dry, or

exposed to light or heat. Minerals having the highest concentration of uranium seemed to emit the most radiation. She then went farther than Becquerel, suggesting a hypothesis that the rays were a result of some property of the very structure of the uranium atoms.

In 1898, Marie found another element that emitted Becquerel rays. It was thorium, and she was becoming convinced that it was an atomic property and not some external cosmic-ray influence. By this time, Pierre was so intrigued by Maries findings that he dropped his own investiga­tions into crystals and joined her in studying pitchblende and chalcolite, which were uranium ores. She had found something interesting: Pitch­blende, from which uranium was extracted, was more radioactive than was pure uranium. There was apparently something mixed in with the uranium.

By chemically processing tons of pitchblende, the Curies were able to identify two new radioactive elements existing in the same mineral with uranium. The first element discovered Marie named polonium, in honor of her native Poland. The second she named radium, for its aggressive radioactivity. With tremendous difficulty, Marie and Pierre managed to refine the radium down to a pure metal, in sub-gram quantities. It was an interesting material. It would glow blue in the darkened laboratory, but the power and the danger in that blue glow were only suspected.