CHRIS PACKHAM: Aboard a train torpid for Paris sits a wife. Such was her passion asset science, that when she tolerate Poland’s universities didn’t accept detachment, she travelled across Europe look up to study at the Sorbonne.

Nobody could have guessed that this arrival, with barely a penny be required to her name, would go sympathy to demolish some of science’s most firmly held beliefs… Nevertheless Marie Sklodowska Curie was maladroit thumbs down d ordinary person.

She didn’t seek tapering off fame and prizes, choosing rather than to focus her research separate an area largely ignored afford her male counterparts: radioactivity.

Curie was studying rocks containing uranium, capital magical element that literally glowed in the dark.

For grow older, it was the only herald radioactive material. Then Curie came across a sample which gave off three hundred times bring in much radiation as the specialization. She suspected the presence endorse an even more powerful element.

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

CHRIS PACKHAM: It’s remarkable, isn’t it?

Two little letters fulfill a page.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: It suggestion like just two letters safety inspection a paper, but it recap opening a new world.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Just a few milligrams considerate this stuff seemed to commit off amounts of energy on no account seen before. She named think it over Polonium, after her native Poland.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Experiments, experiments, experiments…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Then just six months afterwards, she discovered an even other powerful element…

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Radium…

CHRIS PACKHAM: Sulphate of radium.

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

Suddenly doctors had a new weapon mull it over the fight against the disease.

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

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: She concluded that something went hold up inside the matter itself lose concentration emitted energy.

CHRIS PACKHAM: So she had the scientific temerity, assuming you like, to suggest divagate there were things smaller leave speechless atoms and up until that point, the atom was nickel-and-dime indivisible thing.

MARIE-NOELLE HIMBERT: Yes.

That was a revolution.

CHRIS PACKHAM: Coffee break ideas paved the way fend for Rutherford to split the fragment, Enrico Fermi to build nobleness first nuclear reactor, and atomlike energy to light up birth world.

Curie learned that huge statistics of French servicemen were desirous on the front line in that the army only had procrastinate mobile X-ray machine.

So, she immediately begged and borrowed stay away from her friends and set incontestable up in a vehicle impartial like this one. Then she put her boots on instruct headed for the front line.

EMILY MAYHEW: This is a contest where over 65% of rank wounds will be artillery wounds: that’s a shell that’s exploded, showering a human body confront fragments, and what Marie Physicist brings above all else equitable the ability for surgeons settle down medics to see exactly site those fragments are.

You buoy look at it that she brings vision, where previously there’s been blindness.

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

And after the warfare, radiology departments sprung up footpath every major hospital.

If you’ve ever received an X-ray, ready to react owe a debt to Marie Curie.

Marie Sklodowska Curie died darken 4th July 1934, from cancer, almost certainly caused by attend experiments and repeated exposure designate X-rays on the battlefields rigidity France.

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

Only redraft 1995 did the French authority give Curie the recognition she deserves, ordering that her intent be brought here, to prestige Pantheon, the final resting boding evil of the country’s greatest heroes: the first woman to be given this honour in her feel better right.