The ashes of Marie Curie and her husband Pierre have now been laid to rest under the famous dome of the Panthon. Through her discovery of radium, Marie Curie paved the way for nuclear physics and cancer therapy. Born of Polish parents, she was a woman of science and courage, compassionate yet stubbornly determined. Her research and work was to cost her, her life. Marie Curie, or rather Marya Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. Born into a family of teachers and brought up in an environment marked by a sense of duty and a lack of money, she led the most Spartan of lives. From the premature death of one of her sisters, and later of her mother, she drew the skepticism that would later support her faith in science. As a brilliant and mature student with a rare gift of concentration, Marya harbored the dream of a scientific career, a concept inconceivable for a woman at that time. Ambitious and self-taught, she had but one obsession: to learn. She passed her physics degree with flying colors, and went on to sit a mathematics degree. It was then that a Polish friend introduced her to Pierre Curie. In 1895, this freethinker, acknowledged for his work on crystallography and magnetism, became her husband. In her pioneering way, Marie Curie decided, in 1897, to take a physics doctorate. Henri Becquerel, who was studying X-rays, had recently observed that uranium salt left an impression on a photographic plate in spite of its protective envelope. What better subject could there have been for Marie than to try and understand the effect. Pierre consented. And so he and his frail wife set about her work, handling tons of minerals. One day Marie noted that another substance, thorium, was "radioactive", a term she herself had coined. Together, they demonstrated in a major discovery that radioactivity was not the result of a chemical reaction but a property of the element or, more specifically, of the atom. Marie then studied pitch...
