Assignment: Pick a famous woman scientist. Describe her early scientific life, her major contributions to science, and why her work is relevant today.
Scientist chosen: Marie Curie
She was a scientist. In 1867 she was born in Warsaw, Poland. She came up with the word radioactivity. She was not accepted to many universities because she was from Poland and there were a lot of people who didn’t like the Polish. So she went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study and married Pierre Curie. At the Sorbonne, she was the first woman professor.
Marie was experimenting with atoms. The middle of the atom breaks down and little waves shoot off. This is called radioactivity. She discovered radium and polonium which are two elements of the periodic table. She came up with polonium by naming it after Poland where she lived.
In 1903, Marie won the Nobel Prize for physics for the discovery of radioactivity. In 1911, she won another Nobel Prize for chemistry. She died in 1934 because of leukemia that she got by experimenting with radium.
Her work is relevant today because we use things with radium in them. For example, glow in the dark watches and x-rays use radium. X-rays are used for examining broken bones at the doctor’s office.
Sources: Brainpop.com, and the book Marie Curie, A Photographic Story of a Life by Vicki Cobb.
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