Marie Curie

The continuing

One gram of radium from the USA

Irène got a job as an assistent in Marie´s laboratory. Marie was worried. There were no radium, only the first gram that she had extracted in 1902 and she did not consider it to be her own. One single gram costed 100 000 dollars to buy. She got help from an american journalist, mrs Maloney, to arrange a collection for a radiumfund. All american women participated and Marie could go to the USA in 1920 together with her daughters to receive one gram of radium. They had to travel around all of the USA to universities and research centras and people in all places were thanking Marie for recovering from cancer thanks to her. Finally they went to the White House and received the radium.

Working for the League of Nations

When they finally got back to Paris Marie was asked if she could wait for a while with her research. They wanted her to hammer out how to run scientific work to reach out to as many as possible. Thus she became the vicepresident of the international committee for intellectual cooperation in the League of Nations . She worked for the idea that all, regardless of sex, nationality or social position, should be able to get education. As far as she was concerned, the nations must help each other to produce good scientists. Scholarship awards over the countries borders should be established. Besides, she thought it was wrong that the laboratories of the universities always were short of money, while those factories taking advantage of their discoveries constantly got richer.

Research centra in Warszaw and radium from the USA

Now she got to think about the injustices in Poland and wanted to start a project to let Warszaw get a research centra of their own. She got help from her practical inclined sister Bronya, who arranged an     advertising campaign and  sales of bricks to the Marie Curie-Sklodowska-institute. In 1925 they could erect the foundation. Mrs Maloney in the USA was once again arranging a collection for yet another gram of radium and Marie had to go to the White House ance again to receive one gram of radium in 1929 . The institute was inaugurated when Marie was 65 years old. She participated in the inauguration and then she travelled to Bronya to re-establish her childhood memories in Warszaw.

Teaching and researching in Paris

When she returned to Paris she immediately started to teach and research at the new laboratory. She could feel that her body was damaged by the radioactive radiation and therefore she was very careful about the protection of the students. Marie was constantly as active as she always had been. If she did not have time for something at the laboratory during daytime, she continued at home in the evenings. She was reading scientific periodicals in five different languages to keep herself informed about the research results all over the world. But one day in may 1934 she was feeling so bad that she had to go home.

Sick and tired

Eve looked after her mother and physicians and specialists tried to make her recover. The only advice they finally could give her was that she needed som air from the Alps. Eve accompanied her mother to a sanitarium in Switzerland, where she signed in as the widdow Carré. Before leaving the laboratory she told an assistant of the rules valid until she came back: " You will have to lock the actinium in. Nobody might work on that element while I am gone... After the time off we will get started again. "

The ending

Eve realized that Marie would not return to the home, but to spare her mother she was pretending that everything would be alright. Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot were not summoned until Marie was dazed from morphine. Her speach was incoherent and was mostly about some scientific and physical concepts. Finally her body gives up and on july 4 in 1934 Marie Curie dies, 66 (almost 67) years old in  leukaemia. She became a victim of her own discovery.

Author: Katrin Nilsson