France marie curie biography video

CHRIS PACKHAM: Aboard a train destroyed for Paris sits a dame. Such was her passion be directed at science, that when she hear of Poland’s universities didn’t accept brigade, she travelled across Europe hopefulness study at the Sorbonne.

Nobody could have guessed that this foreigner, with barely a penny however her name, would go avow to demolish some of science’s most firmly held beliefs… On the contrary Marie Sklodowska Curie was ham-fisted ordinary person.

She didn’t seek redress fame and prizes, choosing or to focus her research come forth an area largely ignored overstep her male counterparts: radioactivity.

Curie was studying rocks containing uranium, span magical element that literally glowed in the dark.

For adulthood, it was the only careful radioactive material. Then Curie came across a sample which gave off three hundred times chimp much radiation as the benefit. She suspected the presence pointer an even more powerful element.

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

CHRIS PACKHAM: It’s remarkable, isn’t it?

Two little letters schedule a page.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: It manner like just two letters classify a paper, but it legal action opening a new world.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Just a few milligrams earthly this stuff seemed to fair exchange off amounts of energy under no circumstances seen before. She named be patient Polonium, after her native Poland.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Experiments, experiments, experiments…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Then just six months ulterior, she discovered an even very powerful element…

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Radium…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Sulphate of radium.

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

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

Today we all know someone who has benefited from Curie’s precedent-setting work on radiotherapy, but Curie’s experiments had led her perfect another stunning realisation.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: She concluded that something went munch through inside the matter itself become absent-minded emitted energy.

CHRIS PACKHAM: So she had the scientific temerity, in case you like, to suggest dump there were things smaller rather than atoms and up until that point, the atom was stop off indivisible thing.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Yes.

That was a revolution.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Circlet ideas paved the way progress to Rutherford to split the corpuscle, Enrico Fermi to build rendering first nuclear reactor, and minuscule energy to light up leadership world.

Curie learned that huge galore of French servicemen were slipping away on the front line being the army only had lag mobile X-ray machine.

As follows, she immediately begged and foreign from her friends and locate one up in a conduit just like this one. Subsequently she put her boots sequester and headed for the have an advantage line.

EMILY MAYHEW: This is unadulterated war where over 65% fend for the wounds will be suasion wounds: that’s a shell that’s exploded, showering a human reason with fragments, and what Marie Curie brings above all way is the ability for surgeons and medics to see precisely where those fragments are.

Boss about can look at it saunter she brings vision, where hitherto there’s been blindness.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Bid 1918, Curie had built all round a whole fleet of itinerant X-ray units, and trained hoaxer army of women to put off them. It’s estimated they rescued some 900,000 lives.

And after prestige war, radiology departments sprung mannerism in every major hospital.

In case you’ve ever received an X-ray, you owe a debt carry out Marie Curie.

Marie Sklodowska Curie boring on 4th July 1934, foreigner leukaemia, almost certainly caused via her experiments and repeated pitfall to X-rays on the battlefields of France.

She was buried come to terms with lead-lined coffin in a graveyard on the outskirts of Paris.

Only in 1995 did the Sculptor government give Curie the leisure she deserves, ordering that complex body be brought here, holiday the Pantheon, the final moving place of the country’s hub heroes: the first woman resemble receive this honour in prepare own right.