Heroes and Cultural Identity Project

SCE Heroes - Marie Curie

Marie Curie

by Qiu Feng Weng

My hero is Marie Curie because she shows determination. She was a scientist and an inventor. She firmly believed that "if you have a dream, keep the goal with you everything will become true". She believed and did it, which resulted in her becoming first woman to receive two Nobel Prizes. She was the first to use the term radioactivity for this phenomenon to medicine.

Marie Curie with her husband jointly discovery the radioactive element polonium (named after Marie's home country, Poland) and radium (named after Latin word for ray), through the discovery of properties of element-Uranium by A. Henri Becquerel. Curie became interested in them, and then starts to research. Marie Curie found something in the "Pitch-blend," more powerful than uranium, radium. They took four years to isolate this radioactive source in the pitch-blend.

After Pierre Curie died by accident, Marie found that their discovery was not pure radium. She was able to isolate the element by herself, it led to be award the second Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911.

On 4th July, 1934, Marie Curie died in Paris. She died of aplastic anaemia, caused by the radiation poisoning from her own experiments.

Qiu Feng Weng is a science student following a one year university access course in biological sciences.