Marie Curie and the Academy that said no

Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, in 1867, in a divided and occupied Poland. In the part ruled by the Russian Empire, the university didn't admit women. She studied however she could, worked as a governess to help pay for her sister's studies and, in 1891, went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.

The no

The first no almost went unnoticed. In 1903, the French Academy of Sciences nominated Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but not Marie, who had done much of the research on radioactivity. A committee member, the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre. Pierre replied that a prize for radioactivity that left Marie out made no sense. Thanks to a nomination made the year before, her candidacy was accepted. In December 1903, the three shared the prize.

The second no was public. On January 23, 1911, Marie, by then widowed, ran for a seat in the French Academy of Sciences. She lost to Édouard Branly by two votes. The Academy had never admitted a woman. Part of the press of the time attacked her candidacy with arguments about her sex and her foreign origin.

What they did

Eleven months after the rejection, in 1911, Marie Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, for the discovery of radium and polonium. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and to this day the only one to win them in two different sciences. During the First World War, she organized mobile X-ray units to treat the wounded at the front.

She never entered the Academy of Sciences. In 1995, her remains were moved to the Panthéon in Paris, the first woman honored there on her own merits.

What this has to do with Bairo

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez recognizes the immigrant in Marie Curie. She made her life in a country that wasn't hers, in a learned language, and heard, more than once, that she didn't belong there. He, a Colombian, arrived in Brazil while still young and knew the other side of arriving: losing your footing, far from home.

There's also the lesson of the door that didn't open. The Academy said no; the Nobel said yes the same year. A no doesn't need revenge to be overcome. It needs work that goes on. In Bairo's rule: no is the foundation of yes.

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Sources

• AIP, "Marie Curie — Recognition and Disappointment (1903–1905)": https://history.aip.org/exhibits/curie/recdis2_text.htm
• PBS NewsHour, "The day Marie Curie got snubbed by the French science world": https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-day-marie-curie-got-snubbed-by-the-french-science-world
• Nobel Prize, post on the rejection of 01/23/1911: https://x.com/NobelPrize/status/1882338501686894698
• Nobel Prize, Marie Curie: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1911/marie-curie/facts/
• Marie Curie (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie