Author: Eve Curie
Even before her US trip, Marie’s many years of experimenting with radioactive materials were starting to catch up with her. Nowadays one might view her relationship with radium to be reckless, but at the time, the risks weren’t known at all. Quite the opposite, actually – people thought it was a cancer-curing health elixir. Radium drinks and creams were all the rage.
Not only that, radium was Marie’s pride and joy. After all, she’d discovered it with Pierre. She had a special relationship with the substance and compulsively carried it around with her in a vial. She even kept some at her nightstand and would take it out at night to gaze at its hypnotic blue glow. Even now, her records are so radioactive that they have to be kept in a lead safe.
On top of all that, Marie fled to her lab whenever she needed to escape her problems. As a result, she’d exposed herself to far more radiation than if she’d kept a typical eight-hour workday.
As radiation sickness wasn’t a known phenomenon at the time, doctors gave Marie’s health problems all kinds of diagnoses: tuberculosis, gallstones, kidney damage . . . even tinnitus. When she finally died in a sanatorium in 1934, her doctor said it was remarkable she’d lived for as long as she had.
The dangers of her work finally caught up with her in 1934. She died in a sanatorium aged 66, her death almost certainly caused by the radiation she’d spent her life studying.
Marie Curie left behind a luminous legacy. With her incredible determination, she contributed to the discovery of radioactivity and revolutionized our understanding of the atom. She was France's first woman to earn a doctorate and to this day is the only woman to have won two Nobel Prizes. Above all, she blazed an iconic trail through the male-dominated field of physics. And even now, she remains a role model for many young women.
Unfortunately, she didn’t live to see her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie also receive a Nobel Prize the year after she died. Together with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Irène discovered how to generate radioactivity artificially – a real breakthrough that was entirely in the spirit of her mother.
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