Marie CurieDied 4 Jul 1934 at age 66 (born 7 Nov 1867). Marie Sklodowska Curie was a Polish-French chemist and physicist whose celebrated experiments (1898) on uranium minerals led to discovery of two new elements. First she separated polonium, and then radium a few months later. The quantity of radon in radioactive equilibrium with a gram of radium was named a curie (subsequently redefined as the emission of 3.7 x 1010 alpha particles per sec.) With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. Later, she also was sole winner of a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. Her family won five Nobel awards in two generations. She died of radiation poisoning from her pioneering work before the need for protection was known. |
