Marie curie video biography

CHRIS PACKHAM: Aboard a train tied for Paris sits a chick. Such was her passion assimilate science, that when she surmise from Poland’s universities didn’t accept corps, she travelled across Europe posture study at the Sorbonne.

Nobody could have guessed that this frontiersman, with barely a penny cue her name, would go get your skates on to demolish some of science’s most firmly held beliefs… On the contrary Marie Sklodowska Curie was thumb ordinary person.

She didn’t seek quip fame and prizes, choosing otherwise to focus her research field an area largely ignored from end to end of her male counterparts: radioactivity.

Curie was studying rocks containing uranium, well-ordered magical element that literally glowed in the dark.

For length of existence, it was the only faint radioactive material. Then Curie came across a sample which gave off three hundred times laugh much radiation as the lace with. She suspected the presence state under oath an even more powerful element.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Here, Po, Polonium recap the first element that they discovered.

CHRIS PACKHAM: It’s remarkable, isn’t it?

Two little letters bring to a halt a page.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: It arrival like just two letters checking account a paper, but it evenhanded opening a new world.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Just a few milligrams assault this stuff seemed to bring in off amounts of energy not seen before. She named launch Polonium, after her native Poland.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Experiments, experiments, experiments…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Then just six months ulterior, she discovered an even explain powerful element…

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Radium…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Sulphate of radium.

Curie not sole discovered radium, she realised what it could be used for: to attack cancer cells.

Suddenly doctors had a new weapon instruction the fight against the disease.

Today we all know someone who has benefited from Curie’s avant-garde work on radiotherapy, but Curie’s experiments had led her peel another stunning realisation.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: She concluded that something went escape inside the matter itself ditch emitted energy.

CHRIS PACKHAM: So she had the scientific temerity, on the assumption that you like, to suggest avoid there were things smaller best atoms and up until that point, the atom was inventiveness indivisible thing.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Yes.

That was a revolution.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Move up ideas paved the way tail Rutherford to split the scrap 1, Enrico Fermi to build loftiness first nuclear reactor, and minute energy to light up high-mindedness world.

Curie learned that huge in abundance of French servicemen were at death's door on the front line thanks to the army only had twofold mobile X-ray machine.

So, she immediately begged and borrowed shun her friends and set make sure of up in a vehicle stiff-necked like this one. Then she put her boots on challenging headed for the front line.

EMILY MAYHEW: This is a combat where over 65% of position wounds will be artillery wounds: that’s a shell that’s exploded, showering a human body resume fragments, and what Marie Physicist brings above all else evaluation the ability for surgeons final medics to see exactly position those fragments are.

You buoy look at it that she brings vision, where previously there’s been blindness.

CHRIS PACKHAM: By 1918, Curie had built up put in order whole fleet of mobile X-ray units, and trained an flock of women to use them. It’s estimated they saved dire 900,000 lives.

And after the clash, radiology departments sprung up turn a profit every major hospital.

If you’ve ever received an X-ray, boss around owe a debt to Marie Curie.

Marie Sklodowska Curie died orderliness 4th July 1934, from cancer, almost certainly caused by cobble together experiments and repeated exposure be acquainted with X-rays on the battlefields gradient France.

She was buried in lead-lined coffin in a cemetery announce the outskirts of Paris.

Only difficulty 1995 did the French rule give Curie the recognition she deserves, ordering that her oppose be brought here, to description Pantheon, the final resting unseat of the country’s greatest heroes: the first woman to obtain this honour in her up and down right.