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Yet, when the French government later sought to award her the country’s most distinguished honor, la Légion d'honneur, she declined. Not only did she personally instruct and supervise young women in the operation of the equipment, but she even drove and operated one such ambulance herself, despite the danger of venturing too close to the fighting on the front lines.īy the end of the war, it was estimated that Curie’s x-ray equipment, as well as the Radon gas syringes she designed to sterilize wounds, may have saved the lives of a million soldiers. Over the course of the next four years, Curie helped equip and operate more than twenty ambulances (known as “Little Curies”) and hundreds of field hospitals with primitive x-ray machines so as to assist surgeons with the location and removal of shrapnel and bullets from the bodies of wounded soldiers.
#Radium poisoning photos professional
With her personal and professional life in disarray, she sank into a deep depression and retreated (as best she could) from the public eye. Though she had just been awarded a second Nobel Prize, the nominating committee now sought to discourage Curie from traveling to Stockholm to accept it so as to avoid a scandal. Furthermore, it came to light that she had been involved in a romantic relationship with her married colleague, Paul Langevin, though he was estranged from his wife at the time.Ĭurie was labeled a traitor and a homewrecker and was accused of riding the coattails of her deceased husband (Pierre had died in 1906 from a road accident) rather than having accomplished anything based on her own merits. Curie’s nomination to the French Academy of Sciences was rejected, and many suspected that biases against her gender and immigrant roots were to blame. By the 1920s, the price of a single gram of the element reached $100,000 and Curie could not afford to buy enough of the very thing she, herself, had discovered in order to continue her research.īy this time, France had reached the peak of its rising sexism, xenophobia, and anti-semitism that defined the years preceding the First World War. Though not yet fully understood, the glowing green material captivated consumers and found its way into everything from toothpaste to sexual enhancement products. On the contrary, the Curies generously shared the isolated product of Marie's difficult labors with fellow researchers and openly distributed the secrets of the process needed for its production with interested industrial parties.ĭuring the ‘Radium Boom’ that followed, factories sprang up in the United States dedicated to supplying the element not only to the scientific community but also to the curious and gullible public. She refused to cash in on her discoveriesĪfter discovering Radium in 1898, Curie and Pierre balked at the opportunity to pursue a patent for it and to profit from its production, despite the fact that they had barely enough money to procure the uranium slag they needed in order to extract the element. Later that year, thanks to a combination of her accomplishments and the combined efforts of her husband and Mittage-Leffler, Curie became the first woman in history to receive the Nobel Prize. with respect to our research on radioactive bodies.”Įventually, the wording of the official nomination was amended. Pierre, in turn, wrote the committee insisting that he and Curie be “considered together. Thankfully, a sympathetic member of the nominating committee, a professor of mathematics at Stockholm University College named Gösta Mittage-Leffler, wrote a letter to Pierre warning him of the glaring omission. Yet, in a sign of the times and its prevailing sexist attitudes, no recognition of Curie's contributions was offered, nor was there even any mention of her name. In 1903, members of the French Academy of Sciences wrote a letter to the Swedish Academy in which they nominated the collective discoveries in the field of radioactivity made by Marie and Pierre Curie, as well as their contemporary Henri Becquerel, for the Nobel Prize in Physics. She was originally ignored by the Nobel Prize nominating committee By the time she and Pierre eventually submitted their discoveries for professional consideration, Curie had personally gone through multiple tons of uranium-rich slag in this manner.
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Nonetheless, Curie would fondly recall their time together in the leaky, drafty shack despite the fact that, in order to extract and isolate the radioactive elements, she often spent entire days stirring boiling cauldrons of uranium-rich pitchblende until “broken with fatigue”.