Have you heard the ghastly story of Marie Curie? The “mother of modern physics,” whose radioactive legacy left her body buried in a lead-lined coffin? Her research gave the groundwork for treatment in cancer, but the consistent and prolonged exposure came at a deadly cost. Who was she, and what became of her legacy? Read on if you dare.
Our spooky tale begins in 1867 when Marie Curie was born as Marie Skłodowska on November 7 in Warsaw, Poland. She was the youngest of five siblings; however, when her mother died and her father couldn’t support her, she had to work as a governess and tutor. Yet, she always attempted to study in her spare time.
When she was 24, she enrolled at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She couldn’t attend her brother’s university, the University of Warsaw, as the Russian government prohibited women from attending university. There, she decided to do her thesis on radiation, which was recently discovered in uranium by Henri Becquerel. Curie found an ore that was more radioactive than could be explained. She and her husband, Pierre, grounded up samples of pitchblende, which had uranium ore, dissolved them in acid, and separated the different elements present. This led to the discovery of polonium, an element more radioactive than uranium. It was named after Curie’s birth country and listed as the atomic number 84.
Later, in 1898, the two found strong evidence for an even more radioactive element: radium. However, they had no sample of it as pitchblende was an expensive material. So, Curie brought it from a factory in Austria, which removed uranium from pitchblende for industrial use. Then, she processed the pitchblende to extract radium on a larger scale. This work was heavy and physically demanding, and involved dangers that the couple didn’t appreciate. However, in 1902, Curie eventually isolated radium and determined its atomic weight to be 225.93.
Curie also championed the utility of scientific research for the public good. She and her husband figured out that radiation could be used to treat tumors because they found that radium destroyed diseased cells faster than healthy cells.
During World War I, she created small, mobile X-rays used to diagnose injuries near the battlefield. They would be further developed and named ‘Petites Curies’ in 1914, which allowed battlefield surgeons to operate and X-ray soldiers more accurately and effectively. Along with her daughter, Curie also would X-ray to locate fractures, bullets, and shrapnel.
In 1903, Pierre, Marie, and Henri Becquerel won the Nobel Prize for physics for their joint but separate work on “radiation phenomena.” Because of this, Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Later on, in 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating a means of measuring radioactivity.
Curie died on July 4, 1934, from aplastic anemia, which was caused by her research. Her body was so radioactive that she had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin. This wasn’t known until 1995, when the French government wanted to move the Curies to their national mausoleum, the Panthéon. Later examination of Curie’s body revealed that she was well preserved with only small levels of alpha and beta contamination detected. However, her equipment (furniture, cookbooks, clothes, and laboratory notes) still remains extremely radioactive. To this day, they are stored within lead boxes and will remain radioactive for 1,500 years, a haunting reminder of her legacy.
