Marie Curie: A Pioneer in Science

She was born as Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, and her family was actually quite poor. She desperately wanted to continue her education. She loved science, she loved math, but there was no opportunity in her home country to go to university. Women were essentially forbidden. She and her sister came up with a plan that would allow each of them to travel abroad to go to university. She did a degree in physics at Sorbonne and then stayed on for a second degree in mathematics and then was going to do a doctorate. And as part of her doctoral work, she had to decide, of course, what she would focus on for her dissertation. And here, I think she made a very, very critical, strategically important decision, and that she was going to jump into a new field, not something that had been studied to death by others. Just the year before, something brand new called x-rays had been discovered. She decided that what she would try to do in her work is understand the physics of what these rays were and what made them work. So she and Pierre, the two of them together, really devoted these years in intense, intense levels of study, trying to understand what was making these rays work. And in that, she discovered two new elements, and this was a very, very big scientific breakthrough. One she called radium, coming back to the idea of x-rays, and the other she called polonium, and that was really named after her mother country of Poland, where she still had very, very strong national ties. The difficulties faced by a woman in a domain that was traditionally dominated by males, the harsh reality was that people were not willing to admit that a woman could pull this off. So essentially, she was typecast as Pierre's research assistant. In fact, the original nomination for the Nobel did not include her name. The scientific community at large was not willing to recognize her contribution. In her subsequent work after Pierre died, she was able to actually come up with a method to isolate radium. And this was so impressive that to add to her Nobel Prize in physics, the committee actually awarded her a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry. I think she would not have any regrets about how her life turned out. She loved to work so much that every minute of every day, I think, was a joy to her.