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Marie Curie's gift to independent Poland: a radium institute for research and cancer treatment, directed by her sister Bronya. She laid its foundation stone in 1925, and it opened on 29 May 1932. It is today Poland's national oncology institute, which bears her name.
Marie Curie never stopped thinking of Warsaw. In 1913, while the city was still under Russian rule, she helped organise and open a radioactivity laboratory there. After Poland regained independence in 1918, which she called the reparation of more than a century of injustice, she backed a national campaign for a Radium Institute and in 1925 laid its foundation stone on ul. Wawelska.
A cancer clinic needs radium, which Poland could not afford. So in October 1929 she crossed the Atlantic again, and on 30 October President Herbert Hoover presented her with 50,000 dollars collected by American women for radium for Warsaw.
The institute opened on 29 May 1932 with Marie present and her sister, Dr Bronisława Dłuska, as director. It joined her two countries in one work. Today it is the Maria Skłodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology.
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Image: Henryk Poddębski, Polona Digital Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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by Mei Lin 