Marie and Pierre in the laboratory

Marya was a brilliant and mature student with a rare gift of concentration. She dreamt of a scientific career, a concept inconceivable for a woman at that time. But lack of funds meant she was forced to become a private tutor. When Marya was younger, she made huge financial sacrifices so that her sister Bronia could fulfill her wish of studying medicine in Paris, nurturing the hope that the favor might be returned someday. So, in 1891, the shy Marya arrived in Paris. She began studying mathematics, chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne in 1891, and was the first woman to teach there. She passed her physics degree with flying colors, and went on to earn a mathematics degree.

Marie, Pierre & Irene

It was then that a Polish friend introduced Marya to Pierre Curie, a young man, shy and introverted. On July 26, 1895, the two married. Marya adopted the French spelling of her name (Marie) and teamed up with her husband to conduct research on radioactive substances. Marie and Pierre Curie were inseparable, working side by side in the laboratory during the day and studying together in the evening. Even the arrival of their daughter, Irene, in 1897 barely interrupted their routine. The Curie’s found that uranium ore, or pitchblende, contained much more radioactivity than could be explained solely by the uranium content. The Curie's began a search for the source of this radioactivity and in 1898 discovered two highly radioactive elements, radium and polonium. For this work, the Curie's shared the 1903 Nobel prize for physics with another French physicist, Antoine Henri Bacquerel, who had discovered natural radioactivity.

With this honor came immediate international fame - disrupting the two scientists' personal and professional lives for quite some time - and enough money to ease some of their financial burdens. (They had supported the radium research with their own money.) After the birth of her second daughter, Eve, in December 1904, Curie rejoined her husband in the laboratory. Soon after this, the French government wanted to reward the Curies by creating a new professorship in physics at the Sorbonne for Pierre and building a new laboratory for Marie. But before the deal could be finalized, Pierre was killed when he absentmindedly stepped into the path of a horse-drawn wagon on a Paris street.

Marie, or Madame, Curie continued her work on radioactive elements and six years after her

Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie

husband's death she received a second Nobel Prize, in 1911, in recognition of her work isolating radium in its pure metallic form and developing the first international standard for measuring the substance. At the end of the 1920s, Curie began to suffer almost constantly from fatigue, dizziness, and a low-grade fever. She experienced a continuous humming in her ears and a gradual loss of eyesight. Even though a number of her colleagues who had worked with radium were displaying many of the same symptoms and others had died at relatively young ages of cancer, Curie could not bring herself to admit that the element she and her husband had discovered could possibly be at fault. Eventually she did accept the fact that radium was dangerous, but she continued to work with it anyway. In the early 1930s, however, Curie's health noticeably worsened, and doctors finally discovered the cause: pernicious anemia caused by the cumulative effects of radiation exposure.

On July 4, 1934, at the age of 67, Madame Curie died of leukemia at the mountain sanitorium where she had gone to recuperate. One year following her death, in 1935, her eldest daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel prize in chemistry for her work with radioactivity.

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