Life devoted to science



The year was 1898; the month, December; the place, Paris. A woman with blue eyes and blond hair and a dark, bearded man worked in silence in a place described as a “cross between a horse stable and a potato cellar”. Suddenly the woman turned off the gas lights. The darkness was complete except for a faint luminescence, a glow emanating from something in a tube she held in her hand. A few days later Marie Sklodowska Curie and her husband Pierre announced they had discovered a radioactive element. They called it radium.

Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw (Poland) in 1867. She managed to study in Paris, where she lived in poor conditions. There she met a handsome young physics instructor, Pierre Curie, who was impressed by her learning. They shared an interest in the study of magnetism and eventually got married in 1895. Their discovery of radioactivity forced scientists to reconsider old ideas and inaugurated the era of particle physics. Medicine was revolutionised as well: the effect that radium treatment had on cancer, first known as Curie therapy, seemed almost miraculous. In 1903 the Curies were awarded the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, Pierre Curie was run over in the street by a horse-drawn cart and died instantly. Marie was appointed to her late husband’s position, thus becoming the first woman professor at Sorbonne University. She continued her research into the chemical properties of radium and, in 1911, was honoured again with a Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry. She was now the most famous woman scientist in history, and honours were showered upon her.

In 1934 Marie Curie became a patient at a hospital in the French Alps in the shadow of Mount Blanc. Her physical condition was quite bad, with a constant cough and a pernicious anaemia in her blood. The side-effects of her life-long contact with radium were showing up. She had been magnetically attracted to the power of radium, and she died a victim of the substance that had brought her immortality. One could say that Marie Curie really gave her life to science.

PART ONE: READING COMPREHENSION

1. Answer the following questions without copying from the text.

a) How did Marie and Pierre Curie get to know each other?

b) Marie Curie was awarded two Nobel Prizes. What were her main contributions to science?

c) In what two senses does the author of the text suggest that Marie Curie “gave her life to science”?


  PART TWO: WRITING
Choose ONE. Write about either 1 or 2.

Option A: Write down the entry in Marie Curie’s personal diary for December 31st, 1898.

Option B: Imagine it is 1934. You read in the papers that Marie Curie is very ill in a
hospital in Sallanches (France). Write a letter to her with your good wishes for her health
and your opinions about her achievements as a scientist and as a woman. Do not use your
real name.

3. Vocabulary

Explain next words in English, write the phonetics and also an example: faint, to seem, award, cough.