Marie Curie; Two Nobel Prizes Despite Grief and Depression

One of the things I have always found intriguing and enjoyable, living in Paris, is to be able to walk on the same paths as those renown ones did from the past.  I had known about Marie Curie, but had not realized she came to France as a young Polish student to live and even do her research in the same area, where I first settled, when I arrived in Paris.

I  visited the Marie Curie museum several years ago, and again recently  for some of these photos. For years, I have been fascinated by this incredibly genius of a woman who overcame so many obstacles in her time.  She is famous for having discovered two new elements, radium and polonium., and for her work in radioactivity for which she captured Nobel Prizes for each.

Looking at her many accomplishments, one is obviously struck by the many firsts she accumulated.  She was the first women to win a Nobel Prize ever, and then also the first and only to win a second Nobel Prize in another field.

She was the first women to hold a professorship at the Sorbonne and the first and only women who was buried in the Panthéon, where the most famous and accomplished French are laid to rest.

Those enormous difficult feats are worthy alone of tremendous admiration and fanfare.  The fact that she accomplished all these incredible pinnacle of successes when she struggled with recurrent major depression, and multiple losses, makes her story even more incredulous.  Reading her biography, I was struck by all the hardships she encountered and  her tragic early life being marked by the deaths of her sister and mother.

She was born in Warsaw, Poland on November, 7, 1867 into a family of teachers.  Her mother ran a school for girl and her father was a professor of chemistry and physics, who would often bring home lab journals and equipment to instruct and inspire his children.

Marie was the youngest in  a family of five.   Life was very difficult during that time, due to the Russian occupation of Poland.

Marie was only 10, when her oldest sister with whom she was said to have been the closest died of typhus fever.  That was not to be the last death that took away her childhood faith, that up until then was that of a devoted Roman Catholic.

At the age of 12, the darkness of death alighted again in her life when her beloved mother died of tuberculosis.  What ever was left of her childhood innocence and belief in God was destroyed, changing  her view of life  forever.

Marie graduated with honors from high school with hopes I becoming a physicist.  Following graduation, she collapsed into a deep depression,  for which she spent a year in the countryside for convalescent.

Because women were not allowed to attended the University of Warsaw , Marie and her sister both attended a clandestine university for their undergraduate studies.  It  was decided that her sister Bronislawa would go on to Paris in order to study medicine, with Marie staying behind, working as governness to help support her.

The plan was after  Bronislawa finished her degree,  Marie would join her there to begin her own studies in physics.   Marie finally  came in to Paris in 1891 at the age of 24,  initially living with her sister, who had by this time married.

Money would remain scarce for some time to come for Marie, so her life in Paris was difficult and at times brutally uncomfortable, especially in the winter.  She found a small room without heating in the Latin Quarter, where she recounts having to sleep with all her clothes on top in order to stay warm.

Her sister and friends often worried about her looking so pale and thin.  It seemed that Marie was so totally absorbed in her studies and probably due also to depression, that she would often forget to eat, and when she did , it was mostly on bread.  She was even noted to have fainted several times due to hunger and fatigue.

She received her first degree in 1893 and her second in 1894.  That same year she met the rather quiet and likewise as studious Pierre Curie, who was an instructor in chemistry and physics.

Their intense mutual interests in science eventually flourished into a romance.  They were married in a civil ceremony the year of 1895 and jointly started to do research on radioactivity.  Their first child Irene was born in 1897.

The Sorbonne gave them a cold empty shed to conduct their experiments, which focused on the study of radioactivity, which is a word they coined.  Basically it consisted of taking tons of pitchblende(a uranium mineral) and trying to extract what eventually would be called radium.   Marie postulated that there was something there that was emitting much stronger radioactive rays than uranium.

The work was arduous and painstakingly slow.   It took a ton of pitchblende to extract just 1/10 of a gram of radium.     Marie often liked to describe the delight she and Pierre had seeing their hard-earned extracted elements in  jars glowing like “fairy lights” in the darkness of the shed.

Despite the most rudimentary equipment available to them, Marie was able to correctly establish the atomic weight of these new elements, that would be called polonium and  radium.

Hard work and sacrifice played off and in 1903, she, along with husband Pierre, and Henri Becquerel won the Noble Prise in physics for their work in radioactivity.

Despite her great honor, she fell into another episode of depression during a second pregnancy that resulted in a late-term miscarriage.   In 1904 she became pregnant again and gave birth to her second daughter, Eve.

Although she was delighted in the birth  Eve, Marie had grown weary of life’s trials and tribulations and worried about bringing another innocent child into the world to suffer. The majority of photographs of her; I found extremely revealing of her depression and melancholy.

By 1906, her world was to be shattered again, when her husband Pierre was killed in a freak accident crossing Rue Dauphine by a horse-drawn carriage.  Suddenly faced with widowhood,  she was barely able to mobilize herself in taking care of her children and her research.

She was offered and accepted the prestigious chair of chemistry and physics, vacated by her husband at the Sorbonne, therefore becoming the first woman professor in the Sorbonne, that same year.

She relegated the care of her children to their grandfather Dr. Curie, who assumed the role with actually much delight according to accounts by her daughter Eve, who later wrote an official biography of her mother.

In 1911, Marie won her second Nobel Prize in chemistry for her discovery of radium and polonium.   It was also during that year that a  scandal plagued Marie, when she was accused of having an affair with a scientist, and formal pupil of Pierre, Paul Langevin.    Despite the fact  he was already estranged from his wife, Marie was portrayed as a home braker.

By that time she was exhausted physically and mentally from another severe depressive episode.   She retreated to England, staying with a fellow scientist friend for over a year until she felt her energy return.   Little did she know that her most hard-earned discovery, that she called her”little radium” was subvertely destroying her own physical health and had caused the  illness in Pierre even prior to his accidental death.

When World War I broke out Marie became interested in the application of her basic scientific discoveries to help human kind.  She initiated the idea of setting up mobile radiographic centers contained in trucks to serve soldiers who had war injuries.

She and her daughter Irene, who was 17 years old at the time, was trained as a radiographer and both  set off and x rayed thousands of soldiers during that war.  They were known as the “little Curie’s”

The following years, she set up the Institute Curie in Paris and also in Warsaw, for the treatment of cancerous diseases by radiotherapy.  She was quite aware of the powerful attributes of radium to destroy cancerous tumors, but was totally unaware of the potential dangers of extensive exposure to radioactive emissions.

She eventually was diagnosed with aplastic anemia (leukemia) and up to her death on July 4, 1934, never was able to accept that her “little radium” was responsible for her illness.  Her papers, and personal effects were so radioactive, that they were deemed dangerous to be exposed to and to this day are kept in lead boxes.

She was noted to have carried radioactive isotopes in her pockets and unfortunately her daughter Irene was also over exposed to the hidden dangers of radioactivity.

Irene went on to be in her own time a renown physicist and won a Nobel Prize with her husband in 1935.    Due to her own over exposures to radioactive emissions, she too died of leukemia at age 58.  .

Daughter Eve, who was never interested in the sciences and therefore was never exposed to her mothers dangerous rays lived into a ripe old age and died when she was 102.  Her longevity was certainly a testimony to her avoidance of the very substances that ultimately killed both her mother and sister.

Both of Marie’s grandchildren became scientists as well.  Hélene Joliot, daughter of Irene, became a physicist and ironically married the grandson of her former lover, Paul Langevin.    Pierre Joliot became a biochemist and both are still involved in academics in Paris.

Because she and Pierre had never patented their discoveries of radium, she and her descendants never profited financially from the many auxiliary benefits of her discoveries.  Besides using radium to obliterate cancerous tumors, there were even opportunistic physicians back then who purported the benefits of radium as beneficial to beauty preparations.

Marie Curie had the brilliance and dedication to pursue her  intelligent intuitions to the end.  Despite her multiple depressions, she plugged a long with persistence.  Her work was her drug so to speak, it allowed her to be engulfed in her research,  so as to block out the grief that was always there in the recesses of her heart.

From her work, the world has been able to utilise her discoveries to prolong life and give hope to millions of cancer patients.  Despite the tragic and early deaths of Marie Curie, Pierre and her daughter, their deaths were not in vain, as their institutes in France and Poland continue the research that Marie and Pierre devoted their lives in establishing.