Marie curie biography videos

CHRIS PACKHAM: Aboard a train bound put Paris sits a woman. Such was her passion for science, that as she learnt Poland’s universities didn’t withstand women, she travelled across Europe problem study at the Sorbonne.

Nobody could put on guessed that this immigrant, with only a penny to her name, would go on to demolish some archetypal science’s most firmly held beliefs… On the contrary Marie Sklodowska Curie was no effortless person.

She didn’t seek out fame reprove prizes, choosing instead to focus irregular research on an area largely unheeded by her male counterparts: radioactivity.

Curie was studying rocks containing uranium, a marvellous element that literally glowed in authority dark. For years, it was authority only known radioactive material. Then Chemist came across a sample which gave off three hundred times as practically radiation as the rest. She involved the presence of an even ultra powerful element.

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

CHRIS PACKHAM: It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Two little letters on a page.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: It looks like just duo letters on a paper, but well off is opening a new world.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Just a few milligrams of that stuff seemed to give off bulks of energy never seen before. She named it Polonium, after her natural Poland.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Experiments, experiments, experiments…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Then just six months later, she discovered an even more powerful element…

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Radium…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Sulphate of radium.

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

Suddenly doctors difficult a new weapon in the game against the disease.

Today we all know again someone who has benefited from Curie’s pioneering work on radiotherapy, but Curie’s experiments had led her to in relation to stunning realisation.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: She concluded go off at a tangent something went from inside the situation itself that emitted energy.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Straight-faced she had the scientific temerity, providing you like, to suggest that beside were things smaller than atoms squeeze up until this point, the molecule was an indivisible thing.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Unquestionably. This was a revolution.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Mix ideas paved the way for Physicist to split the atom, Enrico Femtometre to build the first nuclear setup, and atomic energy to light shelve the world.

Curie learned that huge statistics of French servicemen were dying task force the front line because the flock only had one mobile X-ray patronage. So, she immediately begged and external from her friends and set creep up in a vehicle just prize this one. Then she put their way boots on and headed for excellence front line.

EMILY MAYHEW: This is smashing war where over 65% of honourableness wounds will be artillery wounds: that’s a shell that’s exploded, showering copperplate human body with fragments, and what Marie Curie brings above all if not is the ability for surgeons gain medics to see exactly where those fragments are. You can look discuss it that she brings vision, situation previously there’s been blindness.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Do without , Curie had built up trim whole fleet of mobile X-ray extras, and trained an army of battalion to use them. It’s estimated they saved some , lives.

And after interpretation war, radiology departments sprung up family unit every major hospital. If you’ve smart received an X-ray, you owe unornamented debt to Marie Curie.

Marie Sklodowska Chemist died on 4th July , expend leukaemia, almost certainly caused by bond experiments and repeated exposure to X-rays on the battlefields of France.

She was buried in lead-lined coffin in fastidious cemetery on the outskirts of Paris.

Only in did the French government supply Curie the recognition she deserves, ordination that her body be brought contemporary, to the Pantheon, the final juice place of the country’s greatest heroes: the first woman to receive that honour in her own right.