Manhattan Project Pioneers: Marie Curie

Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes for her groundbreaking research.

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Quick Facts

Significance:

Pioneering researcher on radioactivity and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize

Place of Birth:

Warsaw, Poland

Date of Birth:

November 7, 1867

Place of Death:

Passy, France

Date of Death:

July 4, 1934

Place of Burial:

Paris, France

Cemetery Name:

The Pantheon

Born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867 (then part of the Russian Empire), as a woman she was denied an education under Russian control. To pursue a scientific education, Curie traveled to France, enrolling at the University of Paris in 1891. It was there that she met her husband and research partner Pierre Curie.

Knowing that uranium emitted radiation, Curie researched other elements to see if they produced the same. Soon she learned the element thorium also produced radiation, leading her to deduce that radiation emitted directly from atoms, not from how they are arranged within molecules. In 1898 Curie and her husband discovered two new elements, radium and polonium. In 1903 the couple received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking research on radioactivity. Pierre Curie died after being hit by a horse-drawn cart in Paris in 1906. In 1911 Marie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium and the isolation of pure radium. 

During World War I, Marie Curie directed the Red Cross Radiology Service, providing x-rays for approximately 1 million soldiers. After the war she traveled to the United States to raise funds for more radium research, opening the Radium Insitute in Poland in 1932. With the harmful effects of radiation not being fully understood during her years of research, Marie Curie died of radiation-induced leukemia in 1934. Both she and her husband are buried in a lead-lined tomb because of their radioactive corpses; her laboratory equipment and even her papers and cookbooks remain too radioactive to be handled safely.