Marie Currie
How They Croaked
Brief Introduction
She was a chemist and a physicist.
Warsaw, France
Died: July 4th, 1934 (Age 66)
Savoy, France
Married: Pierre Curie
History of Marie Curie
Marie was born in Poland on November 7th, 1876. She lived by the life theory of: work slowly, never forget anything and never make a mistake. The word leisure wasn't even in her vocabulary. She moved to Sorbonne, France because there was no college for girls in Poland. During school all she cared about was her grades, not her clothes nor living conditions.
In Sorbonne, she met the French scientist Pierre Curie. They talked about things like crystallography and piezoelectric crystals; things only they could understand, and they got married. There was no wedding dress to the wedding. Her dress was dark and practical, so she could go to the lab right after. Pierre and her had two kids, but her radium child got more attention then her own child. Marie and Pierre won the Nobel Prize with Antoine Henri Becquerel in Physics.
One day Pierre was out and ended up getting hit by a horse-drawn cab and was killed. Marie was upset, but being a manic workaholic she keep on with her work. This lead to her being the first women professor at Sorbonne, and her teaching radioactivity 101.
Later, she won her second Nobel Prize in chemistry. After that she spent a few years driving an x-ray machine around in a truck during World War I, helping to find the bullets stuck inside wounded soldiers. Back at the lab, she tried to find uses for radioactive material in medicine.
Disease: How She Croaked
Symptoms Marie Curie Had:
- Weight loss
- Pale skin
- Black fingertips that cracked and oozed (a sign of infection)
- Loud buzzing in ears
- Double cataracts
- Entire body hurt
- Fever
Significance
Medicine: What they use vs. What we use
- They didn't use any medicines on Marie Curie because they didn't know what was happening
Treatment used today:
- Blood transfusions
- Medcations
- Bone marrow transplant
Quote
- Albert Einstein at Marie Curie's memorial celebration
Vocabulary
- Crystallography - the branch of science concerned with the structure and properties of crystals
- Piezoelectricity - the ability of certain materials to generate a electric charge in response to applied stress
- Pitchblende - a form of the mineral uraninite occurring in black or brown pitchlike masses
- Radioactive - emitting or relating to the emission of ionizing radiation or particles
- Leisure - use of free time for enjoyment
- Aplastic anemia - deficiency of all types of blood cells caused by failure of bone marrow development