Nobel Prize in Chemistry

1911 was the hardest year of Marie Curie's public life. In January the Académie des sciences rejected her by two votes amid xenophobic press attacks. In November, as she returned from the first Solvay physics conference in Brussels, newspapers published letters about her private life and a crowd gathered outside her home.

In the middle of this came the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, "in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element." When Svante Arrhenius of the Nobel committee suggested she not come, she answered that the prize had been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium and that her scientific work had no connection with her private life.

With her sister Bronya and daughter Irène she accepted the prize on 10 December 1911. Her lecture the next day, "Radium and the New Concepts in Chemistry", restated that the idea of radioactivity as an atomic property was hers. Weeks later she fell seriously ill and spent much of 1912 recovering.