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Marie Sklodowska-Curie exhibition at US Congress

PR dla Zagranicy
Peter Gentle 18.10.2011 13:38
An exhibition documenting the life and work of the Nobel Prize winning Polish scientist Marie Sklodowska-Curie has opened at the US Congress in the Rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington.

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The exhibition presents Sklodowska-Curie as one of the most celebrated scientists of all time, a Polish and French patriot, wife to fellow Nobel laureate Pierre Curie and mother to yet another Nobel laureate, Irène Jolie-Curie.

The patron of the exhibition, Democratic Senator for Maryland, Barbara Mikulski, delivered an address during the opening ceremony, which was also attended by Deputy Chief of Mission at the Polish Embassy Maciej Pisarski and Dr. Bradley Miller, Director of the Office of International Affairs at the American Chemical Society.

Prepared by the Sklodowska-Curie Museum in Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences, the exhibition is one of numerous events to celebrate the Year of Maria Skłodowska-Curie, 100 years after she received the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Born in Warsaw in 1867, she graduated from the Sorbonne. In 1903 she was awarded, together with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel, the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1906 her husband was killed in an accident. In 1911 she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, in Chemistry. She devised a method to isolate radium and study its properties, a discovery which later paved the way for cancer therapy. She died in 1934 of leukemia, which is supposed to have been caused by her high exposure to radiation.

Last year, Maria Skłodowska-Curie was named ‘the most inspirational female scientist’ in an online poll by the prestigious British weekly ‘New Scientist’. (mk)

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