Radio Activity => Radium and Polonium.

Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized French physicist and chemist who conducted research on radioactivity. She was a pioneer. Most famous for succeeding in isolating radium in 1910. Later she discovered polonium.

She also defined an international standard for radioactive emissions that was eventually named for her and her husband Pierre: the Curie.

She was born in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, part of the Russian Empire, the fifth and youngest child of well-known teachers. After Russian authorities eliminated laboratory instruction from the Polish schools, her father brought much of the laboratory equipment home and instructed his children in its use.

Unable to enroll in a regular higher education because she was a woman, she and her sister became involved with the clandestine Flying University, a Polish patriotic institution of higher learning that admitted women students.

In late 1891, she left Poland for France, proceeding with her studies of physics, chemistry, and mathematics at the University of Paris.

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (physics), the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice (chemistry), and thus becoming one of only two persons to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields, the other one being with Linus Pauling. Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner of her first Nobel Prize, making them the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes.

She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.

Curie intentionally refrained from patenting the radium-isolation process so that the scientific community could do research unhindered.

In addition to helping to overturn established ideas in physics and chemistry, Curie’s work has had a profound effect in the societal sphere. To attain her scientific achievements, she had to overcome many barriers, in both her native and her adoptive country, that were placed in her way because she was a woman.

Marie Curie once kept a sample of radium next to her bed as a night light, describing the glowing tubes as looking like “faint, fairy lights”. Her notebooks remain so contaminated with radium that they are stored in lead-lined boxes and are still radioactive today. Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years.

She died in 1934, aged 66 from aplastic anemia believed to have been contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation, causing damage to her bone marrow.