ADULTHOOD

In 1891 Marie Sklodowska went to Paris and began to follow the lectures of Paul Appel, Gabriel Lippmann, and Edmond Bouty at the Sorbonne. She came first in the licence of physical sciences in 1893. She began to work in Lippmann's research laboratory and in 1894 was placed second in the licence of mathematical sciences. It was in the spring of this year that she met Pierre Curie which soon turned into a lifelong romance.  Their wedding in July 1985, marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance, in particular the discovery of polonium in the summer of 1898, and that of radium a few months later. Following Henri Becquerel's 1896 discovery of a new phenomenon, later named "radioactivity", Marie Curie, looking for a subject for a thesis, decided to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium at the same time as G.C. Schmidt did. The birth of her two daughters, Irene and Eve, in 1897 and 1904 did not interrupt Marie's intensive scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the École Normale Supérieure for girls in Sévres (1900) and introduced there a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

The sudden death of Pierre Curie on April 19, 1906, was a bitter blow to Marie Curie, but it was also a decisive turning point in her career.  On May 13, 1906, she was appointed to the professorship that had been left vacant on her husband's death, becoming the first woman to teach in the Sorbonne. In 1908, she became titular professor, and in 1910 her fundamental treatise on radioactivity was published. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, for the isolation of pure radium. 

Throughout World War I, Marie Curie, with the help of her daughter Irène, devoted herself to the development of the use of X-radiography. In 1918, the Radium Institute was to become a universal centre for nuclear physics and chemistry. Marie Curie, in 1922, now at the highest point of her fame, devoted her researches to the study of the chemistry of radioactive substances and the medical applications of these substances.

On July 4, 1934, near Sallanches (France), Maria Sklodowska-Curie died of leukaemia, which has a number of standard consequences, one of which can be aplastic anaemia caused by her exposure to the radium that made her famous.

Recognizing Maria Sklodowska-Curie with perhaps its highest posthumous honor in 1995, the French Government transferred her ashes, together with those of Pierre, to the Panthéon in Paris, making her the only woman to be recognized in this way for her own achievements.