Marie Curie and the birth of radiochemistry
Manya Skłodowska, born in Warsaw in 1867 into a family of teachers who opposed the Russian occupation, left Poland in 1891 to study in Paris. With her husband Pierre she isolated two new elements — polonium and radium — from pitchblende residues, in 1898. In 1903 she received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Becquerel and Pierre Curie. In 1911, by then a widow, she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, most probably from cumulative exposure to radiation. Her laboratory notebooks, kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, are still so radioactive today that protective clothing is required to consult them (Simonyi 2012).
Marie Curie’s story sums up the double nature of radioactivity in its early days: a revolutionary discovery, which opened the way to all of nuclear physics and modern medicine, and at the same time a still-unknown danger, whose price the pioneers paid in person before the rules of radiation protection were developed.
Collegamenti
Argomenti: Fisica nucleare Concetti: Decadimento radioattivo
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