Marie Sklodowska Curie
Polish-French chemist
November 7, 1867 - July 4, 1934

Marie Curie, born Marya Sklodovska, was the daughter of school teachers and grew up in Warsaw, Poland in a household full of books. She graduated from high school with honors and went on to study in Paris since the opportunities in her homeland were quite limited. She enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1891 and lived extremely frugally, spending almost nothing on luxuries or food. Curie received her degree four years later, finishing first in her class. Almost exactly 15 years later, Marie Curie became the first woman ever hired to teach at that same university.

Pierre Curie
French chemist
May 15, 1859 - April 19, 1906

Pierre Curie was born in Paris on May 15, 1859. The two first met at the home of a Polish physicist in Paris, and they were married in 1895. By 1896 several physicists, especially Henri Becquerel, had been studying the curious radiation emanating from uranium. Marie Curie was thinking about possible topics for her doctoral thesis, and she had read about this work. Since her physicist husband was working at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie de Paris, she was given a laboratory there-but she had to supply her own materials. As a chemist she was interested in whether other elements would emit such radiation, that is, whether they could be radioactive. After Pierre Curie had developed a highly sensitive way to detect the radiation from a radioactive source, Marie Curie tested every substance she could find.

One of her first findings was to confirm Becquerel's observation that uranium metal itself was radioactive and that the degree to which a uranium-bearing sample was radioactive depended on the percentage of uranium present. Thus, she was astonished when she tested pitchblende, a common ore containing uranium and other metals (such as lead, bismuth and copper), and found that it was even more radioactive than pure uranium. There was only one explanation: pitchblende contained an element more radioactive than uranium.

In 1898 the Curie's published their work on the separation of pitchblende into the various metals that it contained. Using techniques of qualitative analysis she separated a new element from the pitchblende. The Curie's had discovered the next element after bismuth in the periodic table and they named it polonium, after Marie Curie's homeland. After further investigation of the pitchblende, the Curie's uncovered another new, highly radioactive element, radium.

To study radioactivity further, the Curie's needed to isolate larger samples of radium, but they needed much larger amounts of pitchblende. The Austrian government soon sent them a ton of the mineral and, after months of back-breaking labor, they isolated 100 milligrams of pure radium.

In 1903 Bequerel and Marie and Pierre Curie shared the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity. Marie Curie received a second Nobel Prize, this in chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of radium and polonium. Pierre Curie also did important research in magnetic phenomena. He discovered the piezoelectric effect, an effect that is used to generate the sound in a digital watch, for example.