Questions to ask Marie Curie

Who Marie Curie was, in brief

Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw on 7 November 1867, when Poland was divided and Warsaw was ruled by Russia. Polish universities were closed to women, so she studied in secret classes (the “Flying University”) and worked for years as a governess to help pay for her sister Bronisława's medical studies in Paris. She followed her there in 1891, took a degree in physics in 1893 and one in mathematics in 1894, and married the physicist Pierre Curie in 1895.

In 1898 the Curies announced two new elements, polonium and radium. She coined the word “radioactive”. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone: the first person to win two. She died on 4 July 1934 at a sanatorium in Passy, in the French Alps, of aplastic anaemia almost certainly caused by years of radiation exposure.

How to use this list for an interview, a report or a wax museum

For a written or recorded interview, pick eight to ten questions across at least three of the groups below, so the reader sees her whole life and not only radium. For a wax museum, choose three questions a visitor might ask and prepare a 30 second answer for each, written in the first person and based on the record notes. For a report, use the notes under each group as a checklist of facts your answer has to get right.

If you want to hear how the questions land, you can practise by voice with an AI recreation of Marie Curie on Yuga, built from her writings and the historical record. It is a recreation, not the real person, and it can be wrong. Quote her published words and the sources below in your project, not the app. Our interview project guide explains how to turn the answers into a script.

Questions about Warsaw and the move to Paris

What the record says: her own account is the set of Autobiographical Notes she published with her book Pierre Curie (1923). She describes the Russian schools in Warsaw, her years as a governess, and her student life in Paris, living in a cold attic room and studying late into the night.

1. What was it like to go to school in Warsaw under Russian rule?
2. Why did you and your sister Bronisława make a deal about who would study first?
3. What did you learn in the secret Flying University classes?
4. How did you live on so little money as a student in Paris in the early 1890s?

Questions about the shed and the discovery of radium

What the record says: in July 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie reported polonium in the Comptes rendus of the Académie des sciences, and in December 1898 they announced radium with Gustave Bémont. They worked in a leaky shed at the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris, processing tonnes of pitchblende residue. By 1902 she had isolated about a tenth of a gram of radium chloride, enough to measure its atomic weight. Her doctoral thesis, Recherches sur les substances radioactives (1903), sets out the method.

1. Why did you choose uranium rays as the subject of your doctorate?
2. What made you think there was an unknown element in pitchblende?
3. Why did you name the first new element polonium?
4. What was the shed like in winter, and how did you do chemistry there?
5. How did you and Pierre divide the work between physics and chemistry?
6. What did the radium look like in the dark?

Questions about the Nobel Prizes, Pierre's death and 1911

What the record says: the 1903 physics prize went to Becquerel and both Curies. On 19 April 1906 Pierre was killed when a horse-drawn wagon ran him over in a Paris street. She took over his teaching post and became the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911 the Académie des sciences voted not to admit her, newspapers attacked her over her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin, and in the same year she won the chemistry prize. Her letter to Svante Arrhenius that December is the key document.

1. How did you feel when the 1903 prize was announced?
2. What happened to your work after Pierre died in 1906?
3. What was it like to give your first lecture in Pierre's place?
4. Why did you go to Stockholm in 1911 when you were asked not to?
5. How did the newspaper attacks of 1911 affect you and your daughters?

Questions about the First World War and the Radium Institute

What the record says: when war broke out in 1914 she organised radiology for the French army: about 20 vehicles fitted with X-ray equipment (soldiers called them “petites Curies”) and some 200 fixed X-ray posts. She learned to drive, trained women as operators and worked at the front with her daughter Irène. Her book La radiologie et la guerre (1921) is her account. In 1921 she toured the United States and received a gram of radium bought by an American fundraising campaign.

1. Why did you decide X-rays were the most useful thing you could offer in the war?
2. What did you have to learn to run the X-ray cars yourself?
3. What was it like to work beside Irène near the front?
4. Why did you insist the American gram of radium belonged to your laboratory and not to your family?
5. What did you want the Radium Institute in Paris to become?

Questions about money, risk and science

What the record says: the Curies did not patent their method of extracting radium; she explains this in the Autobiographical Notes. She kept radium samples near her and worked without protection for decades. Her laboratory notebooks are still radioactive and are kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in lead-lined boxes. Historians treat the radium health fads of the 1910s and 1920s as a warning, and this is history, not medical advice.

1. Why did you refuse to patent the radium process when you were so short of money?
2. Did you suspect radium was harming your health?
3. What did you think of companies selling radium tonics and cosmetics?

Sample answers in Marie Curie's own words

These answers use only her recorded words, so you can quote them in a project. Each comes from her address “The Discovery of Radium”, given at Vassar College in May 1921.

Q: What made you think there was an unknown element in pitchblende?

Q: Where did you and Pierre do the work?

Q: Why should anyone pay for research that has no obvious use?

For the polonium question, the 1898 paper itself explains the name: the Curies proposed calling the element polonium after the country of origin of one of them. That is a paraphrase of the Comptes rendus note of July 1898, not a quotation.

Questions she could not answer

A strong interview stays inside her lifetime. She died in July 1934, so she never knew several things people often ask about.

• Her daughter Irène and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, the year after she died.
• Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 and the atomic bombs were dropped in 1945. She cannot comment on either.
• Her remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris in 1995.
• Element 96, curium, was named after the Curies in 1944.
• Modern cancer treatment and radiation safety rules: she knew early radium therapy, not today's medicine.

You can still ask her what she hoped radioactivity would be used for. That question has an answer in her own writing.

Where to read Marie Curie's own words

• Autobiographical Notes, printed with her book Pierre Curie (1923; English translation by Charlotte and Vernon Kellogg). The best single source on her life in her own voice.
• Recherches sur les substances radioactives, her 1903 doctoral thesis.
• Her Nobel lecture of 11 December 1911, “Radium and the new concepts in chemistry”, on the Nobel Prize website.
• The Comptes rendus notes of 1898, digitised on Gallica, the French national library's site.
• Ève Curie's biography Madame Curie (1937), written by her younger daughter, which quotes family letters.
• The Musée Curie in Paris, in her old laboratory building.

For more help telling primary from secondary sources, see primary and secondary sources. She also appears in our list of women scientists in history.