SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

People have heard many love stories from Romeo and Juliet to Antony and Cleopatra but few know
 about the turn of the century " love story" of Marie and Pierre Curie . How two people from different worlds came together  and produced some extraordinary discoveries in the fields of Physics and Chemistry .  They spent much of their careers studying radioactivity .They established ; the heavy element thorium which was radioactive and discovered two new elements namely polonium and radium. Polonium was named after Marie " s native country Poland .

In 1891, 24 year old Marie Sklodowska, moved from Warsaw to Paris, where she found work in the laboratory of Pierre Curie, a scientist engaged in research on heat,crystals and magnetism. She was daughter of two teachers when her mom died Marie gave up her education to support her older sister . She had to travel to France in pursuit of higher education as in her native country women were not allowed to attend Universities during that time . She worked day and night at the Laboratory in Paris which   caught the eye of the Laboratory in charge and scientist Pierre Curie .Their interest in science brought them close to each other. They fell in love and later married . They took their honeymoon on bicycles. They expanded the periodic table, discovered two new elements . The Currie's  recognized radioactivity as an atomic property, marking the start  of a new scientific era. They won the Nobel Prize making Marie Curie the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize . They opened up a new lab with the prize money.  In 1906, Pierre was killed in a accident. Marie continued their work alone. She took his job at Sorbonne 's dept of Physics. She became the first female professor at Sorbonne. She  won a second Nobel Prize in 1911 in Chemistry , she was the first person to receive two Noble Prizes.
Marie Curie laid the foundation of Radium Institute in Warsaw ,Poland in 1925 . She created the International Commission of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations . She also wrote an autobiography of her husband named "Pierre Curie" . She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia contracted by her long term exposure to radiation . Marie and Pierre Curie's daughter and son -in -law also received Nobel Prize for their work in the field of Chemistry.