Google pays tribute to Marie Curie with doodle

Search giant Google paid tribute to physicist-chemist Marie Curie Monday, marking her 144th birth anniversary with its patented doodle. Visitors to Google's home page on Monday will see a doole of Curie sitting among laboratory apparatus. Clicking on the doodle will lead to a search results page on Marie Curie, including those on Wikipedia and on NobelPrize.org. The NobelPrize.org website said Marie Sklodowska-Curie was born in Warsaw on Nov. 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school teacher. She received a general education in local schools and some scientific training from her father, and became involved in a students' revolutionary organization and left Warsaw, which was then dominated by Russia, the same website said. She went to Cracow, which at that time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. There, she met Pierre Curie, Professor in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they were married. Marie succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and following her husband's death in 1906, took his place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences. It was the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed Director of the Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris, founded in 1914. Curie developed methods for the separation of radium from radioactive residues to allow for its characterization and the careful study of its therapeutic properties. She actively promoted the use of radium to alleviate suffering. During World War I, assisted by her daughter Irene, she personally devoted herself to this remedial work. She received many honorary science, medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Henri Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize. — RSJ, GMA News