![]() ‘She made the discovery that millions of people have since used.’īut this is not the only reason why some medical institutions bear Skłodowska-Curie’s name. ‘All medicine that relies on radioactivity – on irradiating people – goes back to Marie Curie,’ said Dr Spencer Weart, former director of the Center for History of Physics in Maryland, US. These techniques, in refined form, are widespread today, along with nuclear medicine, which images tumours by dosing patients with substances labelled with radioisotopes. Radiation could shrink tumours, while slivers of radium, applied directly in an approach known as brachytherapy, could do the same. While much of this was misguided, doctors hit gold attacking cancer. It was swiftly put to use in an array of notorious applications such as the illumination of clock faces and was seized on by doctors as a kind of multi-purpose therapeutic weapon against acne, varicose veins, epilepsy and more. Polonium has been used as a heater in space probes and an initiator for nuclear weapons, but it was radium that, with its alluring greenish glow, became the film-star element. And Skłodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium and the isolation of radium, which provided science with a method for isolating and purifying radioactive isotopes. The Curies shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Becquerel. And this set the scene for the web of discoveries about the power lurking within the atom that we know today as nuclear science. ![]() Rutherford eventually devised a new model for the atom: mostly empty space, peppered with electrons, and a dense nucleus in the centre containing protons. Rutherford showed that such radioactive elements had half-lives – an indication of the time it took for them to decay – leading to the radiometric dating used today in fields from geology to archaeology. With supplies of radioactive material from the Curies, for example, the physicist Ernest Rutherford developed a modern alchemy – proposing that some unstable elements naturally transmute into others, emitting radiation as they go. Her work kicked off a series of tumultuous discoveries and launched the field of atomic science. The idea of an unseen subatomic world from which radioactivity - as Skłodowska-Curie named it - came, was seized on by others. ‘All medicine that relies on radioactivity – on irradiating people – goes back to Marie Curie.’ Dr Spencer Weart, physics historian, US This convinced them that the radiation was coming not from any peripheral chemistry arising from molecular interactions but from deep within the atom – a startling idea because the atom was supposed to be the basic, indestructible building block of any element. Pierre had invented instruments that could measure radiation and with these the Curies demonstrated that, no matter what form the uranium was in, it continued to radiate with an intensity proportional to the amount of uranium in the sample. Skłodowska-Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, were fascinated by uranium salts which had been shown by their contemporary, Henri Becquerel, to naturally emit X-rays. But her legacy was amplified by her activities as a humanitarian, an ambassador for science, and, not least, a pioneer for women in science. ![]() She opened new fields in medicine, engineering and science. Why does Skłodowska-Curie capture the imagination so? She was a double Nobel Prize winner and one of only 48 women ever to win a Nobel Prize. Her image persists, too: most commonly, of a severely dressed lady stirring a cauldron of pitchblende in a draughty Parisian shed, haunted by the faint green glow of the radioactivity that was ultimately to kill her. It is more than 80 years since Skłodowska-Curie’s death, but the name of the world’s most famous woman physicist is ubiquitous, adorning research institutes, hospitals, schools, prizes, charities and even an element.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |