Marie Curie Discovers Radium
1896 AD
1896 1896
02.19E48.50N
SCI

PARIS, FRANCE
	Marie Curie thought the experiment must have gone wrong. She had been studying radioactive materials in her damp little Paris laboratory and had found only two elements that were radioactive -- uranium and thorium. But while the pitchblende in front of her contained uranium, the radioactivity was far higher than she expected.
	After trying the experiment again and again, she decided the pitchblende must contain a new, unknown element. Pierre, her husband, was so excited he quit his own studies to join her.
	Together, they broke the pitchblende into simpler and simpler parts, testing each compound for radioactivity.
	Eventually, they found there were two new elements. They called one "polonium," after Marie's home country of Poland, and the other "radium."
	They decided to get a pure sample of radium. Since it was such a small part of the pitchblende they needed tons of the material, but fortunately the Academy of Science in Vienna persuaded the Austrian government to give the Curies the pitchblende residue from uranium mines.
	Marie cooked the pitchblende in large pots, trying to avoid the poisonous fumes and sometimes stirring until she was ready to collapse.
	In 1896, after four years of labor and tons of pitchblende, she obtained enough radium to fill the tip of a teaspoon.
	The radiation from this pure radium was so intense it burned her fingers, so she and Pierre thought it might be able to destroy cancerous cells in the body, allowing healthy cells to grow back. They were right, and the new process was called "Curietherapy" (now known as radiation therapy).
	In 1903 Marie and Pierre received one of England's highest scientific awards, the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. That same year they and Henri Becquerel (for his experiments with uranium) shared the Nobel Prize for physics.
	When Pierre was killed in a traffic accident in 1906, Marie took his place as professor at the Sorbonne University. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, the first time a Nobel Prize had been awarded to the same person twice.
	Finally, in May, 1934 a strange illness overtook her. The radium she had worked with for so long had been poisoning her. She died on July 4, 1934.
	The Curies' work revolutionized scientific thought. It led to the discovery that radioactive elements eventually change into other elements, proving the elements are not unchanging.