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Paris, France
123 years ago

On April 20, 1902, Pierre and Marie Curie successfully isolated a decigram of pure radium for the first time — confirming the existence of the new element they had predicted from their measurements of radioactivity and demonstrating its properties with a precision that their instrumentation had never before allowed. The process had taken four years of backbreaking labor, processing over a tonne of pitchblende ore in a leaking shed in Paris, with no adequate equipment and no institutional support.

Marie Curie had already identified polonium — named after her native Poland, which did not then exist as an independent nation — and had coined the term 'radioactivity' to describe the spontaneous emission of radiation from uranium. She had done so in defiance of an academic establishment that refused to take her seriously as a scientist, an institution that had declined to give her the laboratory positions her work warranted, and a Nobel Committee that initially proposed awarding the 1903 Physics Prize to Pierre alone.

Marie Curie's institutional battles were constant and largely invisible to those who benefited from her discoveries. She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, then under Russian occupation, and came to Paris because Polish women could not attend university in their own country. She studied physics at the Sorbonne and graduated first in her class. When she applied for a position at the University of Paris, she was turned down because she was a woman. She was never admitted to the French Academy of Sciences, which rejected her by two votes in 1911 — the same year she won her second Nobel Prize.

Her second Nobel Prize — in Chemistry, in 1911, for the isolation of radium and polonium — came after Pierre's death in a road accident in 1906, which had left her a widow with two daughters and the directorship of his laboratory. She was the first woman to hold a professorship at the Sorbonne. She was also being publicly attacked that year in the French press for a relationship with fellow physicist Paul Langevin — the misogynist and xenophobic coverage of which was, many historians argue, more interested in destroying her reputation than in the facts of the case.

The radioactivity that made her famous also killed her. She carried test tubes of radioactive isotopes in her pockets, kept them in her desk drawers, and worked in conditions of chronic radiation exposure for decades. She died on July 4, 1934, of aplastic anemia almost certainly caused by her lifelong exposure to radiation. Her personal notebooks from the 1890s are so radioactive that they are stored in lead-lined boxes in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and researchers who wish to consult them must sign a waiver and wear protective clothing.

On April 20, 1902, Marie Curie isolated a decigram of radium at the cost of four years of her health in a leaking shed. She had already been denied every institutional position her work warranted. She would go on to win two Nobel Prizes and die of the radiation she had spent her life studying. Her notebooks are still too radioactive to touch without protection. Her science is still in use. The barriers she fought have not all been removed.

How much do you know about Marie Curie, the discovery of radioactivity, the isolation of radium and polonium, and her extraordinary fight against institutional barriers in 19th and 20th-century science?