Marie Curie can become an example not only in leadership, but also in many areas: in how she worked and lived; in how she collaborated with her husband and how she took care of her daughters. An example would be her persistence: the way she fought her way through the concrete beliefs of the scientific world, helping by her example all the women scientists who were after her. An example could be her dedication to her work, because of which she eventually died of leukemia. This woman admires not so much what she did, but how.
How often does society, in its narrow-mindedness, not recognize geniuses just because they are unusual and do not fit into the generally accepted framework? Marie Curie had to fight her way through the narrow-mindedness of the patriarchal scientific world: society hardly accepted the fact that great scientific discoveries belong to a woman, and not to some old scientist. 79 years have passed since the death of this amazing woman, and her example still continues to inspire scientists.
Here are a few lessons that can be learned from her biography and the features that helped her enter the history of science:
As we know, haters can appear for various reasons: someone is furious that you do not fit into the framework of his morality, someone is just jealous. It's always frustrating, but strong people know how to handle it.
Curie went against one of the most powerful institutions filled with envious and hypocrites — the patriarchal world of science. When she arrived in the States in May 1921, President Warren G. Harding paid her a stupid compliment that fully expressed his attitude towards women: "We are all at your feet. All generations of men would like to award the Nobel Prize to a woman, a devoted wife and a caring mother." It would never have occurred to him to praise a male scientist for his excellent qualities as a family man, although many scientists had families.
In Curie's time, women were considered too sentimental for science, but when journalists asked her about such rumors, Madame Curie replied: "We should be less interested in people and more in ideas" or "In science we should be interested in deeds, not personalities."
We should be less interested in people and more interested in ideas.
It's a great way to deal with this kind of drama — to do your own thing and not pay attention to people.
Maria was born in Warsaw in 1867 and was devoted to science from the very beginning. In her youth, Curie graduated from the women's higher courses of the Flying University, an underground organization that existed in Poland. Maria's father had difficulty feeding five children and simply could not pay for his daughters' education. Then Maria and Bronislava agreed to earn tuition on their own and take turns paying for it to each other.
After Maria earned the education of a doctor for Bronislava, her sister, in turn, helped her to enter the Sorbonne. At the age of 24, the girl brilliantly passed the exams and began studying physics, chemistry and other sciences at the famous Paris university.
She was completely immersed in the study of French and mathematics and barely made ends meet, working part-time in the university laboratory. At that time, she ate so poorly that sometimes she just collapsed from weakness, but her main passion was science. As a result, she received a degree in physics in 1892 and another in mathematics the following year.
This is another lesson from a great woman: perseverance breeds success.
Our relatives and friends heal and support us. Maria Sklodovskaya found her partner — Pierre Curie. This scientist invited her to go through life together fascinated by her dream, which has given so much to humanity and science.
Maria and Pierre conducted experiments together that led to great discoveries in science, together they refused a patent for discovered substances, giving them to all mankind for use, and who knows what their fate would have been if they had not supported each other in scientific research.
Even dull ink is better than a good memory.
Marie Curie constantly kept different journals: she wrote down her own problems and questions in a personal journal, entered the development of her children in another journal, and after her husband died in 1906, she wrote in a mourning journal. By the way, all these magazines have been preserved and they are still radioactive (Maria worked with radioactive substances, but at that time the harm from radiation was not established).
After a long study of uranium, she suggested that the radioactivity of this element depends more on another substance that is part of uranium and thorium, and discovered a new chemical element that was named radium. Its existence was proved only in 1910, when Marie Curie and Andre Debierne managed to isolate pure radium as a metal, and not as a compound. Later, another element was discovered — polonium.
Thanks to Marie Curie, a giant leap in science was made, in addition, she helped introduce her discoveries in radiology (the section of medicine).
With her discoveries, Maria destroyed not only the paradigm of chemistry, but also the paradigm of gender dynamics in science, so that the scientific world after her will never be the same.
