MARIE CURIE BLACK PRINT (NO GUM AS ISSUED) IN CONJUNCTION WITH A
BOOK TO COMMEMORATE THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE POLISH POST
OFFICE. THE ITEM ON SALE IS THE BLACK PRINT ON ITS OWN AND NOT THE
COMPLETE BOOK. THE BLACK PRINT WAS PRINTED BY THE POLISH NATIONAL
PRINTING WORKS IN KRAKOW.
Marie Sklodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a
physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering research on
radioactivity. She was the first person honored with two Nobel
Prizes in physics and chemistry. She was the first female 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 was born Maria Salomea Sklodowska in Warsaw, in what was then
the Kingdom of Poland. She studied at Warsaw´s clandestine Floating
University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw.
In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronislawa to study
in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her
subsequent scientific work. She shared her 1903 Nobel Prize in
Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with the physicist Henri
Becquerel. Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and son-in-law, Frédéric
Joliot-Curie, would similarly share a Nobel Prize. She was the sole
winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sklodowska-Curie was
the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to date to win
in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences.
Her achievements included a theory of radioactivity (a term that
she coined), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the
discovery of two elements, polonium and radium. Under her
direction, the world´s first studies were conducted into the
treatment of neoplasms, using radioactive isotopes. She founded the
Curie Institutes in Paris and Warsaw, which remain major centres of
medical research today.
While an actively loyal French citizen, Sklodowska-Curie (she used
both surnames) never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught
her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to
Poland. She named the first chemical element that she discovered
– polonium, which she first isolated in 1898 – after
her native country. During World War I she became a member of the
Committee for a Free Poland (Komitet Wolnej Polski). In 1932, she
founded a Radium Institute (now the Maria Sklodowska–Curie
Institute of Oncology) in her home town, Warsaw, headed by her
physician-sister Bronislawa. Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia
brought on by her years of exposure to radiation.
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