Part of Polish history
THE Polish government plans to buy the summer house of Polish Nobel laureate Marie Curie, which is for sale in the Paris suburb of Saint-remy-les-chevreuse.
“This place is a part of Polish history,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted recently.
The idea of purchasing the house came about when the estate went on sale for an asking price of 790,000 (Rm3.9mil). The property also needs renovation work that would cost some 200,000 (Rm1mil), according to Le Parisien daily newspaper.
Marie Sklodowska-curie and her husband Pierre used the property as a summer house between 1904 and 1906, but abandoned it shortly after Pierre died in a car accident.
If the house is bought by the Polish government, it will serve as a cultural museum and would display the scientific achievements of Sklodowska-curie alongside her compatriots, Polish government spokesperson Piotr Mueller said recently. Maria Sklodowska-curie was born in Warsaw in 1867 and started her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1891. She later became a naturalised French citizen.
She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, sharing the 1903 honour in physics with her husband and Henri Becquerel for their pioneering work on radioactivity.
She went on to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911 for discovering two elements – radium and polonium, the latter named after her native country. Sklodowska-Curie was the first person and remains the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice.