To celebrate the 144th birthday of Marie Curie, Google has posted a new doodle of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist. The search engine replaced its official logo on its homepage with a doodle of Curie sitting at her desk, surrounded by various beakers. The Google logo can be faintly seen floating behind her.
Curie and her husband Pierre are credited with discovering radium and polonium. For her work, Curie won two Noble Prizes-one in 1903 for physics, and one in 1911 for chemistry.
Born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland in 1867, Curie lost her mother to tuberculosis and one sister to typhus by age 11. She attended a “floating university” with her sister Bronya in Warsaw, as it was illegal for women to attend college in Warsaw at the time.
After the two expanded their studies to Paris, Curie later earned a grant from the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to study the magnetic properties of different steels. It was that grant that led her to her husband’s lab.
The Curies were married in 1895, and she succeeded her husband as the Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne. The two were inspired by Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in 1896, which led to them later discovering radium and polonium.
Pierre was killed in 1906, after being run over by a horse-drawn carriage. After his death, Currie assumed his job as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences, and was the first woman to ever do so. She later became the director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris.
Currie died in July 1934, at the age of 66. She suffered from aplastic anemia, a blood disease brought on by excessive exposure to radiation.
Written by: Karen Benardello
