The right-wing French press, including the daily Excelsior, attacked Curie's candidacy for the French Academy with scurrilous and racist claims based on supposedly scientific analyses of her handwriting and facial characteristics.
The Academy Debacle
SCANDAL-DRIVEN PRESS is not a recent phenomenon. Pierre and Marie had been hounded by intrusive reporters as early as , when news began to circulate about the medical uses of radium. After they won the Nobel Prize, reporters redoubled their attentions. But until late most press coverage of Marie Curie focused on the heroic labors of the blonde, foreign-born mother, wife, and then widow. Some of the press changed its tune, however, in November , when Curie offered herself as a candidate for the single vacant seat for a physicist in the French Academy of Sciences.
Her main rival for the seat was year-old Edouard Branly, whose scientific reputation was based on his contribution to wireless telegraphy. When Italian
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Illness and Rebirth
URING THE PRESS FRENZY Curie received a telegram informing her that she had been given an unprecedented second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry. Although severely shaken by the scandal, she mustered the strength to attend the award ceremony, accompanied by her sister Bronya and her daughter Irène. At the ceremony on December 10, , the president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explained why Curie's discovery of two new elements deserved this additional recognition. It had not only revolutionized scientific understanding of the nature of the atom but had also opened up new areas of medicine and even helped measure the age of the earth. In her lecture the following day, Curie reasserted her claim to be the first to see that radioactivity was a property built into atoms.
Svante Arrhenius, an influential Swedish physicist on the Nobel committee, at first encouraged Curie to accept the award in person, but when the scandal deepened he
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A two-time Nobel laureate, Marie Curie is best known for her pioneering studies of radioactivity.
Marie Sklodowska Curie (–) was the first person ever to receive two Nobel Prizes: the first in in physics, shared with Pierre Curie (her husband) and Henri Becquerel for the discovery of the phenomenon of radioactivity, and the second in in chemistry for the discovery of the radioactive elements polonium and radium.
From Poland to Paris and the Radioactive
The daughter of impoverished Polish schoolteachers, Marie Sklodowska worked as a governess in Poland to support her older sister in Paris, whom she eventually joined there. Already entranced with chemistry, she took advanced scientific degrees at the Sorbonne, where she met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist who had achieved fame for his work on the piezoelectric effect.
For her thesis she chose to work in a field just opened up by Wilhelm Roentgen’s upptäckt of X-rays and Becquerel’s insamling of the mysterious power o