FOR RADIUM WORK

Evening Star, Issue 20321, 1 November 1929, Page 9

FOR RADIUM WORK

GIFT TO MADAME CURIE Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright. WASHINGTON, October 81. (Received November 1, at 9 a.m. President Hoover to-day presented Madame Curie with 50,000d01, the gift of various groups of Americans for a precious gramme of radium, to be presented to the Curie Hospital and Research Institute at Warsaw. This is the second gift tho Americans have given to Madame Curie. MADAME CURIE,

For a lady who has devoted her whole life to science to be declared th© most popular woman in France on a public ballot is no mean tribute, but this was recently paid to Madame Curie, tho widow of Professor Curie, and co-discoverer with him of radium, the most useful medical find of recent years. A couple of years ago tho French Government awarded her a small pension, as she had found considerable trouble in carrying on her work owing to a lack of money. She is the founder and main supporter of the Radium Institute, and the expense of keeping this going has taxed her resources to the utmost; so much so that at one time it was thought she would have to abandon tho project. She was also hampered in her experiments bv an inadequate stock of radium, but this was later _ overcome after she had visited the United States in 1921 and received the presentation of a gramme of radium from the women of America, _ Tho daughter of Professor Sklodowski, a Pole, Madame Curie was born at Warsaw in 1867, and later studied in Paris, taking a science degree at the university there. In 1895 she married Dr Pierro Curie, the French physicist, and after working for several years at the Ecole de Physique in Paris, she carried out highly important experiments on the radio-activity of uranium compounds, a phenomenon discovered by Henri Bequerel in 1896. This research work led up to the epoch-making discoveries or polonium and radium. After years of arduous work, carried out in an abandoned shed with the most primitive of equipment, Madame Curio succeeded in isolating pure radium salts. The Nobel Prize was awarded to her in 1903 in company with Dr Curie and M. Bequerel, and in the same year she became a Doctor of Science. On the tragic deatli of her husband in 1906, she succeeded him as professor at the Paris University, and in 1911 was awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize for her work on radio-activity. The Paris Radium Institute and the Warsaw Radio-Activity Laboratory owe much to Madame Curie. During the Great War she organised a valuable radiological service in the _ hospitals, and later directed the Curie Laboratory in Paris, which is still her chief aim in life, apart from its experimental side.