Curie_Marie2

__**Biography**__ Childhood Pierre After Pierre’s Death Death  **Childhood** Marie Sklodowska was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. She was the youngest of five children who all graduated with the highest grades in their class. Both of her parents were school teachers. The Sklodowska family struggled financially. When Marie was only twelve years old, her mother died of tuberculosis. Soon after, her oldest sibling Zofia died of typhus.  Back Pierre** At the Sorbonne, Marie met Pierre Curie. He was a teacher in the School of Physics and Chemsitry. They were both interested in magnetism and started dating. That summer, Marie returned to Warsaw. When she was denied a job at Kraków University because she was a woman, Marie returned to Paris to be with Pierre. In July 1895, they got married and studied together in their laboratory. Irène, their first daughter, was born in 1897. In 1903, Marie and her husband were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Sorbonne made Pierre a professor and let him build his own laboratory. A year later in 1904, the Curies had their second daughter, Eve. On April 19, 1906, Pierre was run over by a horse-drawn vehicle. On May 13, the Sorbonne physics department gave Pierre’s job to Marie, along with full authority over the laboratory, making her the first female professor at Sorbonne .  Back **After Pierre’s Death** In 1910, Marie had an affair with physicist Paul Langevin. He had been Pierre’s student and was five years younger than Marie. He left his wife for her, and she was portrayed in the tabloids as a home-wrecker. (Marie’s granddaughter later married Langevin’s grandson.)  In 1911, Marie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, making her the first person to win two Nobel Prizes and one of only two people to be awarded a Nobel Prize in two different fields.
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This enabled her to talk the French government into building a private radium institute, now the Institut Curie, in 1914 at which research is conducted in chemistry, physics, and medicine. During World War I, Marie used mobile radiography units, which became known as “petites Curies,” to treat wounded soldiers. These units were powered using tubes of radon, a colorless radioactive gas given off by radium. In 1921, Marie visited the United States to raise funds for research on radium. She returned in 1929 to equip the Warsaw Radium Institute, which was founded four years earlier with her sister Bronislawa as director.

In her later years, Marie was the head of the Pasteur Institute and of a radioactivity laboratory built for her by the University of Paris. She visited Poland one last time in the spring of 1934. Back  Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934 at the Sancellemoz Sanatorium in Passy, France from aplastic anemia, caused by exposure to radiation. She was buried in Sceaux beside her husband. In 1995, their remains were moved to the Paris Panthéon.
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Marie was the first woman to be buried there. Her laboratory is at the Musée Curie. Her work is considered too dangerous to handle due to their radioactivity. It is kept in lead-lined boxes and you have to wear protective clothing to touch them.

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