Who was Marie Curie?
Marie Curie, a truly remarkable woman whose ground-breaking research into radioactivity completely revolutionised our understanding of cancer and still forms the basis of modern cancer treatment.
Marie Curie (born 1869, died 1934) was a Polish physicist and chemist who spent most of her working life in France. She was a brilliant scientist and one of the first people to experiment with radioactivity. She was the first person to win two Nobel prizes and also the first to win them for two entirely different fields.
At the time it was extremely unusual for a woman to be so involved in advanced physics research and even more unusual for her to win such respect and acclaim for her work. Even today, she remains the only woman to have won two Nobel prizes.
Marie Curie died in 1934 from 'aplastic anemia' which was almost certainly caused by the years of expsoure to radiation she had experienced in her work. At the time the dangers of radiation were not known.
To find out more about Marie Curie and her work, check out the websites below.
What is cancer?
Our bodies are made up of groups of cells, each cell so tiny it is invisible to the naked eye.
These cells reproduce themselves so that the tissues and organs of our body are constantly being regenerated and repaired.
Cancer develops when cells start to divide at the wrong time and in the wrong place, then continue to divide and invade nearby tissues and organs. It is this uncontrolled growth of cells that causes a cancerous swelling or tumour.
There are around 200 different types of cancer, depending on the cell type involved, and they vary greatly from each other and in the types of treatment needed.
About 150,000 people in the UK die from cancer every year.
