DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From Serious Young Student to Mother of Modern Physics

Imagine This: You are a young Polish woman whose dream is to become a scientist, but in Poland women aren’t even allowed to go to universities. So what do you do?

 You’re born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 7, 1867, the youngest of five children. Your father is a professor of mathematics and physics, and your mother had been the director of a girls’ boarding school.

 The Polish people are struggling under the crushing yoke of the Russian tsars who rule them. Your family focus is on education and serving others, and your parents believe that learning is the most exalted goal in anyone’s life. They also believe that learning will keep Poland’s intellect alive and restore her independence.

 Your’re just a young girl when you lose your mother to tuberculosis and your sister Zosia to typhus. To cope with these painful losses, you and your other sisters pretend to be genius doctors who discover a miracle cure.

 Your dream is to study physics at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), the most distinguished school of science in the world, so you and her older sister Bronia make a pact. You will work and help support Bronia through medical school and then after graduation, Bronia will help support you.

 Finally, in September 1891, eight years after graduating at the top of your high school class, you’re ready to continue your own education. With the blessings of your father, you pack your clothes and move to Paris where you live in a tiny, bare attic room—-freezing in the winter and broiling in the summer.

 Two months later, having passed the exams, you’re accepted as a student of physics at the Sorbonne. A brilliant student, you graduate first in your class with a degree in physics in 1893, the first woman to receive a master’s degree in physics from the Sorbonne.

 You’re hired in 1894 to do a study of the magnetic properties of steel, and you meet Pierre, a noted physicist and the manager of the laboratory where you will conduct your research. You and Pierre spend every spare minute together discussing science, and a year later you’re married.

 In 1896 another scientist Antoine Henri Becquerel tells you and Pierre about the glowing rays he has seen in a brown lump of uranium ore called pitchblende. Pierre suggests that you use that for the subject of your doctoral degree.

 You begin testing chemical elements to identify the substance causing the glow and a year later conclude that the mysterious substance is an unknown “radiant” element.

 You and Pierre announce the discovery of this new element in July 1898, and you name it polonium in honor of your native country Poland.

 But there is something more powerful still trapped in the pitchblende. Later that year, on December 26, you and Pierre announce the existence of a second element, more highly radioactive than any other known. You name it radium.

 At the time, scientists believe that the atoms of elements are unchangeable whereas you and Pierre are proving that the atoms of radioactive elements are constantly changing and even transforming from one element into a completely different one. And as atoms of radioactive elements change from one element into another (the decay process), they release energy which you call “radioactivity.”

 In November 1903, you and Pierre and Henri Becquerel are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for your work on  radioactivity—-the first Nobel Prize awarded to a woman.

 In 1911, you are awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery and isolation of polonium and radium. This is the first time anyone has received the Nobel Prize twice and for two different sciences—-first physics, then chemistry.

 You die on July 4, 1934, at age sixty-six of leukemia, brought on by your years of exposure to high level of radiation. And later you become known as the woman who helped unlock the secrets of the atom which revolutionized modern science and ushered in the nuclear age.

                           “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

                                                  Marie Curie (1867-1934)

Excerpted from They Stood Alone!: 25 Men and Women Who Made a Difference by Sandra McLeod Humphrey

 For More about

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vTRrZU-LKQ

 Giving Back: During World War I, Marie Curie and her daughter Irene took X-ray and radium therapy equipment onto the battlefields of France where over one million wounded soldiers were X-rayed for bullets and shrapnel. Knowing exactly where to operate, doctors were able to save countless lives.

 Did You Know that  Marie Curie’s notebooks are still so radioactive that they can’t be handled?

 Something to Think about: When young Polish women were not even allowed to go to Polish universities, what do you think drove Marie Cure to want to continue her higher education?

 Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week’s true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!