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Why did Marie Curie investigate the mineral pitchblende?
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Marie Curie
Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only woman to win the award in two different fields (Physics, 1903; Chemistry, 1911).
Marie Curie investigated the mineral pitchblende because she observed that its level of radioactivity was significantly higher than that of pure uranium.12
She reasoned that this superior activity could only be explained by the presence of small quantities of an unknown, highly active substance within the ore. This hypothesis led her and her husband, Pierre Curie, to undertake the challenging work of isolating these substances, which ultimately resulted in the discovery of the elements polonium and radium.12