Although everyone has heard of Marie Curie and her contributions to science, in fact, we owe two elements to her and her husband Pierre, polonium (Po) and radium (Ra), there are many other women who also contributed to the periodic table of elements and that usually go unnoticed. Women enriched the periodic table in various ways, yet most are unable to name more than one.
Rhenium
German chemist and physicist Ida Noddack discovered with her husband Walter, the element rhenium (Re) – named after the river Rhine. Rhenium is one of the rarest elements in the world and was the last natural element to be discovered. Despite various confrontations over the discovery, a virtual experiment at the US National Institute of Science and Technology showed that the data published in 1925 by Ida and Walter Noddack were consistent. Noddack was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but she never succeeded.
Astatus
Austrian physicist Berta Karlik and contemporary of Marie Curie, discovered astatine (At), a radioactive element used for cancer therapy. Karlik was also the first female professor at the University of Vienna. The number 85 on the periodic table is the rarest on Earth. There are barely 25 grams on our planet and its average life is very short: 7.2 hours.
Meitnerio
The chemical element 109, meitnerium (Mt), was named in honor of the Austrian theoretical physicist Lise Meitner, whose discoveries began the atomic age (as she was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission and for which her colleague, and not her, received the Nobel Prize). He continued to study radioactivity and co-discovered protactinium (Pa). Peter Armbruster, who co-discovered this element, affirmed that the baptism of this element as Meitnerium sought to ‘do justice to a victim of German racism and give due credit to a scientific life and work’.
Radium and polonium
We talked about it at the beginning. This world famous Polish physicist discovered radium (Ra) and polonium (Po) with her husband Pierre; made history by winning two Nobel Prizes for his work on radiation ; and it also became an integral part of the periodic table with the homonym curium (Cm), atomic number 96.
France
French physicist Marguerite Perey was interviewed by Marie Curie herself at the Radium Institute in Paris. He got the job and started learning how to isolate radioactive elements. He discovered francium (Fr), element number 87, baptizing it with the name of his own homeland. Francium is such a rare element that one cubic kilometer of the earth’s crust contains approximately fifteen grams of this element. It is a very unstable radioactive metal. She became Professor of Nuclear Chemistry at the University of Strasbourg and was the first woman elected to the French Academy of Sciences. Like Curie and her daughter, she ended up dying of a radiation-related illness.
