Every March, people in the United States celebrate the achievements and history of women as part of Womens History Month. The story of the Nobel laureate was back on the big screen in 2017 with Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge, featuring Polish actress Karolina Gruszka. In honor of women's history month, we have chosen one significant event from each decade over the past century. She studies far into the night and completes degrees in physics and math. As a child, Curie took after her father. By 1898 the Curies had obtained traces of radium, but appreciable quantities, uncontaminated with barium, were still beyond reach. [25][51] During the French Academy of Sciences elections, she was vilified by the right-wing press as a foreigner and atheist. While a French citizen, Marie Skodowska Curie, who used both surnames,[8][9] never lost her sense of Polish identity. [51] This resulted in a press scandal that was exploited by her academic opponents. She focused so hard on her studies that she sometimes forgot to eat. She traveled to the United States twice in 1921 and in 1929 to raise funds to buy radium and to establish a radium research institute in Warsaw. Curie was the youngest of five children, following siblings Zosia, Jzef, Bronya and Hela. Irne Joliot-Curie - Biographical - NobelPrize.org Unauthorized use is prohibited. [65][66] In 1922 she became a fellow of the French Academy of Medicine. Marie Curie died at the age of 66 in 1934 of aplastic anemia, which was attributed directly to her research with uranium and radioactivity. She was the first woman to win any kind of Nobel Prize. [89] An artistic installation celebrating "Madame Curie" filled the Jacobs Gallery at San Diego's Museum of Contemporary Art. They did not realize at the time that what they were searching for was present in such minute quantities that they would eventually have to process tonnes of the ore.[37], In July 1898, Curie and her husband published a joint paper announcing the existence of an element they named "polonium", in honour of her native Poland, which would for another twenty years remain partitioned among three empires (Russian, Austrian, and Prussian). [30] She hypothesized that the radiation was not the outcome of some interaction of molecules but must come from the atom itself. Famous Scientists: FREE Printables and Resources About Marie and Pierre While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Her death is the result of leukemia caused by exposure to radiation. Born as Maria Salomea Sklodowska on 7th November, 1867, in erstwhile Russia occupied Poland, Marie Curie moved to Paris and became a French citizen.