Marie curie for kids youtube

CHRIS PACKHAM: Aboard a train bound for Paris sits a woman. Such was her passion for science, that when she learnt Poland’s universities didn’t accept women, she travelled across Europe to study at the Sorbonne.

Nobody could have guessed that this immigrant, with barely a penny to her name, would go on to demolish some of science’s most firmly held beliefs… But Marie Sklodowska Curie was no ordinary person.

She didn’t seek out fame and prizes, choosing instead to focus her research on an area largely ignored by her male counterparts: radioactivity.

Curie was studying rocks containing uranium, a magical element that literally glowed in the dark. For years, it was the only known radioactive material. Then Curie came across a sample which gave off three hundred times as much radiation as the rest. She suspected the presence of an even more powerful element.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Here, Po, Polonium is the first element that they discovered.

CHRIS PACKHAM: It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Two little letters on a page.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: It looks like just two letters on a paper, but it is opening a new world.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Just a few milligrams of this stuff seemed to give off amounts of energy never seen before. She named it Polonium, after her native Poland.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Experiments, experiments, experiments…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Then just six months later, she discovered an even more powerful element…

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Radium…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Sulphate of radium.

Curie not only discovered radium, she realised what it could be used for: to attack cancer cells.

Suddenly doctors had a new weapon in the fight against the disease.

Today we all know someone who has benefited from Curie’s pioneering work on radiotherapy, but Curie’s experiments had led her to another stunning realisation.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: She concluded that something went from inside the matter itself that emitted energy.

CHRIS PACKHAM: So she had the scientific temerity, if you like, to suggest that there were things smaller than atoms and up until this point, the atom was an indivisible thing.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Yes. This was a revolution.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Her ideas paved the way for Rutherford to split the atom, Enrico Fermi to build the first nuclear reactor, and atomic energy to light up the world.

Curie learned that huge numbers of French servicemen were dying on the front line because the army only had one mobile X-ray machine. So, she immediately begged and borrowed from her friends and set one up in a vehicle just like this one. Then she put her boots on and headed for the front line.

EMILY MAYHEW: This is a war where over 65% of the wounds will be artillery wounds: that’s a shell that’s exploded, showering a human body with fragments, and what Marie Curie brings above all else is the ability for surgeons and medics to see exactly where those fragments are. You can look at it that she brings vision, where previously there’s been blindness.

CHRIS PACKHAM: By 1918, Curie had built up a whole fleet of mobile X-ray units, and trained an army of women to use them. It’s estimated they saved some 900,000 lives.

And after the war, radiology departments sprung up in every major hospital. If you’ve ever received an X-ray, you owe a debt to Marie Curie.

Marie Sklodowska Curie died on 4th July 1934, from leukaemia, almost certainly caused by her experiments and repeated exposure to X-rays on the battlefields of France.

She was buried in lead-lined coffin in a cemetery on the outskirts of Paris.

Only in 1995 did the French government give Curie the recognition she deserves, ordering that her body be brought here, to the Pantheon, the final resting place of the country’s greatest heroes: the first woman to receive this honour in her own right.