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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Curie-Sklodowska Maria. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Maria Skłodowska was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw. She was the youngest of five children in the family of Vladislav and Bronislava Sklodovsky. Maria was brought up in a family where science was respected. Her father taught physics at the gymnasium, and her mother, until she fell ill with tuberculosis, was the director of the gymnasium. Mary's mother died when the girl was eleven years old. The girl studied brilliantly in both primary and secondary schools. Even at a young age, she felt the magnetic power of science and worked as a laboratory assistant in her cousin's chemical laboratory. The great Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table of chemical elements, was a friend of her father. Seeing the girl at work in the laboratory, he predicted a great future for her if she continued her studies in chemistry. Growing up under Russian rule, Maria took an active part in the movement of young intellectuals and anti-clerical Polish nationalists. Although Curie spent most of her life in France, she remained forever devoted to the struggle for Polish independence. Two obstacles stood in the way of Maria's dream of higher education: the poverty of the family and the ban on the admission of women to the University of Warsaw. With her sister Bronya, they developed a plan: Maria would work as a governess for five years to enable her sister to graduate from medical school, after which Bronya should bear the cost of her sister's higher education. Bronya received her medical education in Paris and, becoming a doctor, invited her sister to her. After leaving Poland in 1891, Maria entered the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). It was then that she began to call herself Maria Sklodowska. In 1893, having completed the course first, Maria received a licentiate degree in physics from the Sorbonne (equivalent to a master's degree). A year later, she became a licentiate in mathematics. But this time Maria was second in her class. In the same 1894, in the house of a Polish immigrant physicist, Maria met Pierre Curie. Pierre was the head of the laboratory at the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. By that time, he had carried out important research on the physics of crystals and the dependence of the magnetic properties of substances on temperature. Maria was researching the magnetization of steel, and her Polish friend hoped that Pierre could give Maria the opportunity to work in his laboratory. Having first become close on the basis of passion for physics, Maria and Pierre got married a year later. This happened shortly after Pierre defended his doctoral dissertation - July 25, 1895. “Our first dwelling,” Maria herself recalls, “a small, extremely modest three-room apartment was on Glacier Street, not far from the School of Physics. Its main advantage was the view of the huge garden. The furniture, the most necessary, consisted of things that belonged The housework was almost entirely my responsibility, but I had already gotten used to it during my student life. Professor Pierre Curie's salary was six thousand francs a year, and we did not want him, at least for the first time, to take on extra work. As for me, she began to prepare for the competitive examination necessary to take a place in a girls' school, and achieved this in 1896. Our life was completely devoted to scientific work, and our days passed in the laboratory, where Schützenberger allowed me to work with my husband ... We lived very friendly, our interests coincided in everything: theoretical work, research in the laboratory, preparation for lectures or exams. During the eleven years of our life together, we almost never parted, and therefore our correspondence over the years occupies only a few lines. Days of rest and holidays were devoted to walking or cycling, either in the countryside around Paris, or on the coast or in the mountains. Their first daughter, Irene, was born in September 1897. Three months later, Curie completed her research on magnetism and began looking for a dissertation topic. In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium compounds emit deeply penetrating radiation. Unlike X-rays, discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Roentgen, Becquerel radiation was not the result of excitation from an external source of energy, such as light, but an intrinsic property of uranium itself. Fascinated by this mysterious phenomenon and the prospect of starting a new field of research, Curie decided to study this radiation. Starting work at the beginning of 1898, she first of all tried to establish whether there were other substances, besides uranium compounds, that emit the rays discovered by Becquerel. Since Becquerel noticed that air became electrically conductive in the presence of uranium compounds, Curie measured the electrical conductivity near samples of other substances using several precision instruments designed and built by Pierre Curie and his brother Jacques. “My experiments showed,” Curie later wrote, “that the radiation of uranium compounds can be accurately measured under certain conditions and that this radiation is an atomic property of the element uranium; its intensity is proportional to the amount of uranium contained in a particular compound, and does not depend on any characteristics of a chemical compound, nor from external conditions, such as lighting or temperature. After that, I started looking to see if there were other elements that had the same properties. To do this, I checked all the elements known at that time, in pure form or in the form of compounds. I found that among these substances, only compounds of thorium emitted rays similar to those of uranium. The radiation of thorium has an intensity of the same order as that of uranium, and is also an atomic property of this element. I had to look for a new term to name this new property of matter, inherent in the elements uranium and thorium. I suggested the name radioactivity, and since then it has become generally accepted; radioactive elements are called radioelements. Soon, Maria made a much more important discovery: uranium ore, known as uranium pitchblende, emits stronger Becquerel radiation than uranium and thorium compounds, and at least four times stronger than pure uranium. Curie suggested that uranium resin blende contained an as yet undiscovered and highly radioactive element. In the spring of 1898, she reported her hypothesis and the results of experiments to the French Academy of Sciences. Then the Curies tried to isolate a new element. Pierre set aside his own research in crystal physics to help Maria. In July and December 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced the discovery of two new elements, which they named polonium, after Mary's homeland of Poland, and radium. Since the Curies did not isolate any of these elements, they could not provide chemists with decisive evidence for their existence. And the Curies began a very difficult task - the extraction of two new elements from uranium resin blende. To extract them in measurable quantities, the researchers had to process huge amounts of ore. For the next four years, the Curies worked in primitive and unhealthy conditions. During this difficult but exciting period, Pierre's salary was not enough to support his family. Despite the fact that intensive research and a small child took up almost all of her time, Maria in 1900 began teaching physics in Sevres, at an educational institution that trained secondary school teachers. Pierre's widowed father moved in with Curies and helped look after Irene. In September 1902, the Curies announced that they had succeeded in isolating one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride from several tons of uranium resin blende. They failed to isolate polonium, as it turned out to be a decay product of radium. Analyzing the compound, Maria determined that the atomic mass of radium was 225. The radium salt emitted a bluish glow and heat. This fantastic substance attracted the attention of the whole world. Recognition and awards for its discovery came to the Curies almost immediately. After completing her research, Maria finally wrote her doctoral dissertation. The work was called "Investigations into Radioactive Substances" and was presented at the Sorbonne in June 1903. According to the committee that awarded Curie the degree, her work was the greatest contribution ever made to science by a doctoral dissertation. In December 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Becquerel and the Curies. Marie and Pierre Curie received half of the award "in recognition ... of their joint research on the phenomena of radiation discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel." Curie became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Both Marie and Pierre Curie were ill and could not travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony. They received it next summer. “The award of the Nobel Prize,” Curie wrote, “was an important event for us in view of the prestige associated with these prizes, established at that time quite recently (1901). From a material point of view, half of this prize was a serious amount. From now on, Pierre Curie could transfer the teaching at the School of Physics to Paul Langevin, his former student, a physicist with great erudition.In addition, he invited a preparator personally for his work. At the same time, the fame that this happy event brought turned out to be a heavy burden for a person who was not prepared and unaccustomed to it. It was an avalanche of visits, letters, requests for lectures and articles - constant causes of loss of time, excitement and fatigue. Even before the Curies had completed their research, their work prompted other physicists to also study radioactivity. In 1903, Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy put forward the theory that radioactive radiation is produced by the decay of atomic nuclei. During decay (the emission of certain particles that form the nucleus), radioactive nuclei undergo transmutation - transformation into the nuclei of other elements. Curie accepted this theory not without hesitation, since the decay of uranium, thorium and radium is so slow that she did not have to observe it in her experiments. True, there were data on the decay of polonium, but Curie considered the behavior of this element atypical. Yet in 1906 she agreed to accept the Rutherford-Soddy theory as the most plausible explanation for radioactivity. It was Mary who coined the terms decay and transmutation. The Curies noted the effect of radium on the human body (like Henri Becquerel, they received burns before they realized the danger of handling radioactive substances) and suggested that radium could be used to treat tumors. The therapeutic value of radium was recognized almost immediately, and prices for radium sources skyrocketed. However, the Curies refused to patent the extraction process and use the results of their research for any commercial purposes. In their opinion, the extraction of commercial benefits did not correspond to the spirit of science, the idea of free access to knowledge. Despite this, the financial situation of the Curies improved, as the Nobel Prize and other awards brought them some prosperity. In October 1904, Pierre was appointed professor of physics at the Sorbonne, and a month later, Marie became officially the head of his laboratory. In December, their second daughter, Eva, was born, who later became a concert pianist and biographer of her mother. Maria drew strength from the recognition of her scientific achievements, her favorite work, love and support from Pierre. As she herself admitted: "I found in marriage everything that I could dream of at the time of the conclusion of our union, and even more." But on April 19, 1906, Pierre died in a street accident. Having lost her closest friend and workmate, Maria withdrew into herself. However, she found the strength to keep going. In May, after Maria refused a pension granted by the Ministry of Public Education, the faculty council of the Sorbonne appointed her to the chair of physics, which was previously headed by her husband. When Curie gave her first lecture six months later, she became the first female lecturer at the Sorbonne. After the death of her husband, she remained a tender and devoted mother to her two daughters. One of the daughters, Irene, who became a famous physicist, recalls: "My mother was very fond of spending her free time in country walks or working in the garden, and during the holidays she preferred the mountains or the sea. Marie Curie was fond of physical exercises and always found a reason to do them and make my sister and I do them. She loved nature and knew how to enjoy it, but only not contemplatively.In the garden she took care of flowers, in the mountains she liked to walk, stopping, of course, sometimes to rest and admire the landscape ... Mother did not lead a secular life. She only visited the homes of a few friends, and even then quite rarely. When she had to attend any receptions or official celebrations, it was always tiring and boring for her. But she found a way to make the best use of this time by striking up conversations with her tablemates about their specialty. Developing this theme, any of them almost always could tell something interesting. The fact that the mother did not seek social connections or connections with people of influence is sometimes taken as evidence of her modesty. I believe that this is rather just the opposite: she very correctly assessed her importance and she was not at all flattered by meetings with titled persons or with ministers. It seems to me that she was very pleased when she happened to meet Rudyard Kipling, and the fact that she was introduced to the Queen of Romania did not make any impression on her. In the laboratory, Curie focused her efforts on isolating pure radium metal rather than its compounds. In 1910, in collaboration with André Debierne, she managed to obtain this substance and thereby complete the cycle of research begun 12 years ago. She convincingly proved that radium is a chemical element. Curie developed a method for measuring radioactive emanations and prepared for the International Bureau of Weights and Measures the first international standard of radium - a pure sample of radium chloride, with which all other sources were to be compared. At the end of 1910, at the insistence of many scientists, Curie was nominated for election to one of the most prestigious scientific societies - the French Academy of Sciences. Pierre Curie was elected to it only a year before his death. In the history of the French Academy of Sciences, not a single woman has been a member, so Curie's nomination led to a fierce battle between supporters and opponents of this move. After several months of insulting controversy, in January 1911 Curie's candidacy was rejected in the election by a one-vote majority. A few months later, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Curie the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for outstanding services in the development of chemistry: the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." Curie became the first Nobel Prize winner twice. Introducing the new laureate, EV Dahlgren noted that "the study of radium has led in recent years to the birth of a new field of science - radiology, which has already taken possession of its own institutes and journals." Maria spent a lot of work to achieve a decent laboratory for the development of a new science of radioactivity. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute established the Radium Institute for research on radioactivity. Curie was appointed director of the Department of Fundamental Research and Medical Applications of Radioactivity. During the war, she trained military medics in the applications of radiology, such as X-ray detection of shrapnel in the body of a wounded man. In the frontline zone, Curie helped create radiological installations and supply first aid stations with portable X-ray machines. She summarized the accumulated experience in the monograph "Radiology and War" in 1920. After the war, Curie returned to the Radium Institute. In the last years of her life, she supervised the work of students and actively promoted the application of radiology in medicine. She wrote a biography of Pierre Curie which was published in 1923. Periodically, Curie made trips to Poland, which gained independence at the end of the war. There she advised Polish researchers. In 1921, together with her daughters, Curie visited the United States to accept a gift of one gram of radium to continue the experiments. During her second visit to the United States (1929) she received a donation for which she purchased another gram of radium for therapeutic use in one of the Warsaw hospitals. But as a result of many years of work with radium, her health began to noticeably deteriorate. Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934 from leukemia in a small hospital in the town of Sansellemose in the French Alps. Author: Samin D.K.
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