[00:00.00]Madam Curie to Be Permitted into the Pantheon

[00:08.15]On the eve of the International Women’s day on March 8th,1994

[00:13.85]French President Mitterrand made the announcement

[00:17.47]that Madame Curie was soon to be admitted into the Pantheon-

[00:20.90]the memorial hall of the French national heroes.

[00:24.82]The decision, though coming 60 years late,

[00:28.54]is a great inspiration and gratification to the people.

[00:32.25]Madam Curie, born in Warsaw,Poland in 1867,

[00:36.97]is a French professor of physics,

[00:39.39]and was taught the value of learning and raised to a patriot by her parents.

[00:44.53]Due to her gender,

[00:46.18]she was not allowed admission into any Polish universities

[00:49.78]after graduating from high school.

[00:51.84]Eventually, with the monetary assistance of her elder sister,

[00:56.02]she moved to Paris and studied chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne,

[01:01.60]where she became the first woman to teach.

[01:04.43]Although Marie was not as well prepared as her fellow students,

[01:09.36]through hard work she completed master’s degrees in physics

[01:13.51]and math in only three years.

[01:15.82]It was at the Sorbonne that she met Pierre Curie who became her husband later.

[01:22.16]Just think of the hardship she and her husband went through

[01:25.98]in those hundreds of days in a damp shed

[01:29.59]when they tried to extract pure uranium.

[01:32.97]Madame Curie had to bear both the endless obsessions of strict working style and serious attitude

[01:40.09]and the excessive heavy work which even a strong man would find hardly possible to endure.

[01:46.11]Such was her mental and physical burden that Mr. Curie had sighed and said,

[01:52.02]“the life we’ve chosen is really too hard.”

[01:55.06]When the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903,

[02:02.08]the great honor quickly changed their lives.

[02:05.35]Sorbonne University belatedly found funds for a laboratory

[02:09.61]and Marie Curie was hired as “laboratory chief”.

[02:13.24]Unfortunately, in 1906 Mr. Curie was killed in a traffic accident.

[02:19.24]“It is impossible for me to express the profoundness of the crisis brought into my life

[02:25.47]by the loss of the one who had been my closest companion,”

[02:29.08]Madam Curie said sadly.

[02:31.60]Crushed by the blow, she did not feel able to face the future.

[02:36.30]She could not forget, however, what her husband used sometimes to say,

[02:41.44]“Even deprived of me, you ought to continue our work.”

[02:45.93]She was left alone to bring up children and, at the same time,

[02:50.85]persisted in her giant research project on radium.

[02:54.47]She refused all the honors and titles that she deserved and buried herself in science research.

[03:02.12]She received a second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911.

[03:07.15]So she became the first scientist in the world to win two Nobel Prizes.

[03:13.39]Since man’s civilization began,

[03:16.33]there have been very few women like Madame Curie

[03:19.74]who so perfectly combined the role of a scientist,a wife and mother.

[03:24.99]She joined with all readiness organization protecting the patents and copyrights

[03:31.09]and copyrights of her fellow scientists.

[03:32.96]She says that scientists need protection while in laboratories the way a child needs it,

[03:39.20]so that they may be free from the worries of material life.

[03:43.57]This, if we may say so,

[03:45.85]is Madame Curie’s transfer of maternal love to young scientists.