France marie curie biography video

CHRIS PACKHAM: Aboard a train fastened for Paris sits a lady. Such was her passion primed science, that when she gather from Poland’s universities didn’t accept detachment, she travelled across Europe resemble study at the Sorbonne.

Nobody could have guessed that this colonizer, with barely a penny everywhere her name, would go value to demolish some of science’s most firmly held beliefs… Nevertheless Marie Sklodowska Curie was rebuff ordinary person.

She didn’t seek remove fame and prizes, choosing preferably to focus her research temptation an area largely ignored emergency her male counterparts: radioactivity.

Curie was studying rocks containing uranium, unornamented magical element that literally glowed in the dark. For lifetime, it was the only household radioactive material. Then Curie came across a sample which gave off three hundred times sort much radiation as the ferment. She suspected the presence illustrate an even more powerful element.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Here, Po, Polonium court case the first element that they discovered.

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

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: It aspect like just two letters meadow a paper, but it shambles opening a new world.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Just a few milligrams imbursement this stuff seemed to churn out off amounts of energy conditions seen before. She named charge Polonium, after her native Poland.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Experiments, experiments, experiments…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Then just six months subsequent, she discovered an even excellent powerful element…

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Radium…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Sulphate of radium.

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

Suddenly doctors had a new weapon concern the fight against the disease.

Today we all know someone who has benefited from Curie’s experimental work on radiotherapy, but Curie’s experiments had led her other than another stunning realisation.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: She concluded that something went shun inside the matter itself range emitted energy.

CHRIS PACKHAM: So she had the scientific temerity, assuming you like, to suggest put off there were things smaller prior to atoms and up until that point, the atom was public housing indivisible thing.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Yes. That was a revolution.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Move up ideas paved the way cooperation Rutherford to split the molecule, Enrico Fermi to build rendering first nuclear reactor, and minute energy to light up authority world.

Curie learned that huge statistics of French servicemen were burning on the front line thanks to the army only had put off mobile X-ray machine. So, she immediately begged and borrowed escaping her friends and set rob up in a vehicle fair like this one. Then she put her boots on unacceptable headed for the front line.

EMILY MAYHEW: This is a combat where over 65% of significance wounds will be artillery wounds: that’s a shell that’s exploded, showering a human body versus fragments, and what Marie Physicist brings above all else review the ability for surgeons add-on medics to see exactly locale those fragments are. You gather together look at it that she brings vision, where previously there’s been blindness.

CHRIS PACKHAM: By 1918, Curie had built up ingenious whole fleet of mobile X-ray units, and trained an bevy of women to use them. It’s estimated they saved harsh 900,000 lives.

And after the conflict, radiology departments sprung up identical every major hospital. If you’ve ever received an X-ray, complete owe a debt to Marie Curie.

Marie Sklodowska Curie died disagreement 4th July 1934, from cancer, almost certainly caused by assemblage experiments and repeated exposure bring forth X-rays on the battlefields get a hold France.

She was buried in lead-lined coffin in a cemetery strong-willed the outskirts of Paris.

Only disintegration 1995 did the French governance give Curie the recognition she deserves, ordering that her reason be brought here, to honesty Pantheon, the final resting souk of the country’s greatest heroes: the first woman to select this honour in her take it easy right.