Marie Curie

Two-Time Nobel Laureate · Physicist & Chemist · 1867–1934

The first person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences — discoverer of polonium and radium.

Explore the life of Marie Curie — five chapters

1. The Flying University — Studying illegally in occupied Poland
2. The Shed — Two new elements, extracted from tonnes of rock
3. Two Prizes and a Death in the Street — Recognition that had to be argued for
4. The Little Curies — X-ray units driven to the front line
5. What Radium Cost — Illness, an institute, and a family of laureates

Read the five-chapter life of Marie Curie →

Where Marie Curie appears in your course

Marie Curie has a genuine claim on 13 lessons of the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE science course built into Incandio. Six of them:

• Alveoli, Exercise and Smoking — Biology: Curie worked for years with materials whose danger nobody suspected, carrying tubes of radium in her pockets, and the illness that killed her almost certainly came from that exposure. Her case is the clearest example of the pattern this lesson describes in smoking: a harm that is invisible at the time, accumulates with dose, appears only after many years, and is denied by almost everyone while it is happening.
• Variation and Mutation — Biology: The next lesson names ionising radiation as a cause of mutation, and Curie is the person who isolated the substances that produce it and who paid for it. She and Pierre described the burns their samples caused, she carried radium in her pockets and kept it by her bed, and she died of a blood disorder consistent with prolonged exposure. Her notebooks are still radioactive and are stored in lead-lined boxes. Nobody has a more direct claim on the fact that radiation changes living tissue.
• How Mutations Affect Proteins — Biology: Statement 3.37 names ionising radiation as a cause of mutation, and Curie isolated the substances that emit it. She and Pierre described the burns their samples produced on skin, and she worked with radium for decades with no protection — carrying tubes of it in her pockets and keeping it beside her bed because it glowed. She died in 1934 of a blood disorder consistent with prolonged exposure, and her laboratory notebooks are still radioactive enough to be kept in lead-lined boxes. She also drove mobile X-ray units to the front in the First World War, which saved lives using the same phenomenon.
• Air Pollution and the Greenhouse Gases — Biology: Every gas on this page comes from an industrial or agricultural process, and Curie is one of the few figures who did that work with her own hands. To isolate a tenth of a gram of radium chloride she processed tonnes of pitchblende residue in a leaking shed, stirring boiling vats with an iron rod nearly as tall as herself, breathing whatever came off them. She understood better than almost anyone that obtaining something useful means releasing something else, and she paid for it with her life.
• Pure Substances, Mixtures and How to Separate Them — Chemistry: Crystallisation on this page is a beaker and an evaporating basin. Curie ran the same technique on tonnes of pitchblende — thousands of repeated fractional crystallisations — to isolate a tenth of a gram of radium, and had to invent ways of knowing when a sample was finally pure.
• Inside the Atom — Chemistry: This lesson tells you the atom has parts. For most of chemistry's history that was denied — 'atom' means 'uncuttable'. Curie showed that some atoms break apart on their own and turn into different elements, which is the evidence that forced chemistry to accept an internal structure at all.

Begin

• Start a conversation with Marie Curie — a dramatised, historically grounded AI portrayal
• Read the Historical Brief
• Explore the life of Marie Curie — five chapters
• Find your exam topics · Meet all 208 figures