Marie Curie's Tomb

This room holds the tombs of two scientists, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie. The Curies are the only couple among those buried in the Panthéon in which both husband and wife are recognized as French heroes, and Marie is the first woman laid to rest here on her own merits. That's not her only "first." She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she won the prestigious award twice, in physics and in chemistry.

On her tomb, her name appears with the word "Skłodowska." We know her as Madame Curie, but Marie had two surnames. Curie was her husband Pierre's name, while Skłodowska was the name of her father, who was Polish. Marie was originally from Warsaw, Poland. Her mother died when she was ten, and she studied on her own. Wanting to study mathematics and physics in greater depth at university, she came to the Sorbonne in Paris, and that was the start of her life in France.

She then met and married Pierre Curie, and the two, who shared the same interests, worked together. Radioactivity was drawing intense interest in the scientific world at the time, and the Curies began analyzing it. Their research led them to discover two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium. Polonium was named after her homeland of Poland. Radium got its name from the Latin word for "ray," because it gives off light on its own without taking in energy from outside. Radium was far more radioactive than uranium, which had been discovered earlier, and drew fierce attention from scientists. Pierre once placed radium on his skin and discovered that it was harmful to the body. Turning that around to destroy cancer gave birth to radiation therapy, now a leading cancer treatment. Radiation is also used in a range of other treatments and still saves countless patients today.

For discovering polonium and radium, she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre. After he died, she carried on with her research and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. During World War I, she and her daughter loaded portable X-ray machines onto trucks and treated the wounded themselves. Her daughter, too, later continued the work on radioactivity and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

But while busy treating the wounded, Marie carried radioactive material in her pockets, was exposed to radiation, and died of aplastic anemia. Wholly devoted to her research, she is said to have handled, melted, and stirred eight tons of uranium ore with her bare hands. Even after her death, her remains continued to emit a significant amount of radiation. That is why Marie Curie's tomb, which you see here, is lined with lead to block the radiation.