Maria Sklodowska-Curie, preeminent female scientist

JAKARTA: It is 131 years since the birth of Maria Sklodowska- Curie, the most eminent woman in the exact sciences, and 100 years have elapsed since she and her husband Pierre Curie first began their detailed investigations of radioactivity.

Born in Warsaw on Nov. 7, 1867, Maria was the fifth child in a family of teachers. Her father, Wladyslaw Sklodowski, taught mathematics and physics in secondary schools and her mother, Bronislawa, was principal of a well-known girl's school in Warsaw.

At 16, Maria completed secondary school with a gold medal award. In 1882, she had to face hardships which would have broken a weaker character.

Her desire was to study further at all costs. But in Warsaw, there was no Polish university. Other universities did not accept women. Only in distant Paris would it be possible to study, and how was one to get there with an empty purse?

Maria Sklodowska was not one to accept the impossible. If she could not go today, she would go in 10 years time -- but go she must!

She then turned to the hard, unrewarding job of being a governess. She went to the country or taught privately in Warsaw homes, while studying on her own. She attended conspiratorial lectures at the "mobile university" organized in Warsaw by a group of teachers and students.

She also took part in educational activities for workers, while in the country she organized a village school for peasants' children. Her first teaching experiences as a young woman created in her a lasting attachment to civic activity.

During the period, Maria took her first steps in the domain of experimental research. The museum of industry and agriculture in Warsaw at the turn of the century was largely a home for Polish scientific life. A physics laboratory was set up there, headed by the well-known physicist and chemist, Jozef Jerzy Boguski. Though work conditions were obviously not suitable, she was able to enter the milieu of scientific work.

After nine years of strenuous endeavors on the part of a devoted sister, Dr. Bronislawa Dluska, Maria finally departed in 1891 to study in Paris. By the end of four years she had graduated in mathematics and physics; her days and nights were filled with learning in a cold room on the sixth floor.

After graduation in 1894 she wanted to return to Poland. However, she had the difficulty obtaining an assistantship at Jagiellonian University in Cracow. To return to Poland would mean giving up scientific research and deprive her life of its real meaning.

Moreover, friendship and common love of science had led to a bond being formed between the young Polish girl and an eminent French physicist and crystallographer, Pierre Curie. In 1895 they married.

Following their marriage, the Curies worked side by side in the laboratory of the Ecole municipale de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, where Pierre Curie headed the physics department. Their initial research was conducted quite independently; he was engaged in the study of the growth of crystals while she began work in 1897 on her historic doctoral dissertation.

The subject of Maria's research was "uranic" radiation. In 1896 French scholar Henri Becquerel had observed that the salts of uranium, the heaviest of the hitherto known elements, steadily emitted invisible rays which made an impression on a photographic plate. Becquerel called these rays "uranic", but did not draw any further conclusions regarding their nature. These rays became the subject of Maria's research.

As a result of systematic investigations, she demonstrated that the ability of uranium to emit radiation was a property of the atom of this element, since it was not dependent on the nature of the uranium compound but only on the percentage content of the uranium.

This was the first time in the history of chemistry that an atomic property had been discovered. Classical chemistry had assumed that the properties of a compound were completely different from those of the elements which made up the compound. Yet here radiation was occurring in uranium in the metallic state as well as in all of its compounds, thus maintaining its nature.

It followed from this that uranium radiation might be linked to the interior of the atom, referred to today as the atomic nucleus, and not affecting the region around it in which are the chemical forces binding the atoms into molecules.

Realizing that the phenomenon she had discovered revealed hitherto unknown atomic forces, Maria suggested that the ability to emit radiation like uranium be named radioactivity, and that chemical substance with this property be called radioactive for not only uranium showed this ability to emit radiation.

The subject of her further research appeared so interesting that Pierre gave up his work on crystals and joined his wife's investigations to extract a new form of uranium ore. They rapidly obtained results of epochal importance.

In July 1898 they reported the discovery of a new chemical element, which they named polonium after Maria Sklodowska's homeland. Only a few months later the Curies reported the discovery of a second radioactive element which they called radium. The year 1998 marks the beginning of the study of radioactivity.

The essential nature of radioactivity was shortly afterward elucidated both by the research of the Curies and by that of scientists in other countries.

It is based on the transformation of one element into another, resulting from the emission of certain elements from the interior of the atomic nucleus. The demonstration of this fact was a turning point in the history of chemistry.

At the end of the 19th century, chemistry was based on two principles: the indivisibility of the atom and the impossibility of transforming one element into another.

The discovery of radioactivity destroyed both these principles for all time, and made possible the identification of the components of the atom and the observation of the transmutation of the elements.

Later developments showed that some nuclear reactions are accompanied by a powerful thermal effect, not encountered in the reactions of classical chemistry. As a result, they study of radioactivity became a starting point of studies on the nature of the structure of matter and on the release of nuclear energy, and for this reason the discovery of the phenomenon of radioactivity is regarded as one of the most significant advances in the history of the exact sciences.

In 1906 a tragic change occurred in the work and life of Maria. On April 19 Pierre Curie died, run over by a heavy cart on one of the narrow streets of Paris.

After her husband's death she continued to work alone. She became head of a department at the University of Paris and bent her effort to the setting up of a center, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and in 1915 the Paris radium Institute was founded -- a living memorial to the work of Maria Sklodowska- Curie.

Between 1918 and 1934 she headed the physico-chemical department of the Paris Radium Institute. Her activities during these years included her own further research as well as organizational and teaching work in the training of pupils, among whom were always Poles.

Throughout her life, she never broke her contact with Poland. In 1912 the Warsaw Scientific Society created the Radiological Laboratory and she was the honorary head. In 1923, on the 25th anniversary of the discovery of radium, construction was begun on the Warsaw Radium Institute. She became its honorary director. To the last days of her life, she followed its development with the closet interest. Maria Curie died on July 4, 1934, in the sanatorium of Sancellemoz in southern France.

-- Polish Embassy