You Must Improve Individuals For A Better World
Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields Physics and Chemistry. She was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.
She developed the theory of radioactivity and coined the word. She discovered two elements, polonium and radium.
Underneath this incredible professional persona was a woman who was denied the opportunity to marry the man that she loved because her family had lost all of their money trying to liberate Poland in an earlier struggle and so she was not in a high enough position in society and therefore denied the right to marry the man she desired. She had two children with her ultimate husband, before he was struck by a horse drawn carriage and killed. This left her to raise her two children by herself.
The right wing of French society was overwhelmed with xenophobia and spread rumors that she was Jewish in efforts to discredit her and force her out of the country. Later they would attack her as a foreigner and an atheist.
She would later take the money that she had been awarded for her second Nobel prize and put that money into war bonds to try and save France, the country that had turned on her.
During World War I she recognized that wounded soldiers were best served if operated on as soon as possible and she started creating radiology centers accompanied by her 17-year-old daughter. Ultimately she created over 200 radiological units at field hospitals in the first year of the war. It is estimated that her work ultimately saved more than 1 million lives.
She conducted all of her work, unaware that radiation was poisonous and eventually died from it. But not before she had traveled around the world lecturing on the knowledge that she had accrued and galvanizing an entire generation of women to elevate themselves to the highest stations in life in favor of using their minds for the benefit of humanity❤️
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