ASHES OF MARIE CURIE ENSHRINED
FIRST WOMAN HONORED AT MEMORIAL TO FRANCE'S 'GREAT MEN'
Author: Associated Press
Date: Friday, April 21, 1995
Page: 16
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
PARIS -- Making amends for centuries of Gallic sexism, male leaders watched
yesterday as the ashes of scientist Marie Curie were enshrined in the
Pantheon, the first woman honored at the memorial to the nation's "great men."
The ceremony at the domed monument, draped with a huge French flag, was a
symbolic triumph for French women's rights activists and a dramatic farewell
gesture by President Francois Mitterrand.
Ailing with cancer as he completes the final weeks of his 14-year
presidency, Mitterrand fulfilled a 1993 request from feminists that a woman be
enshrined in the Pantheon.
On Mitterrand's order, the ashes of Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre
Curie, were transferred from a small-town cemetery and carried in wood coffins
into the Pantheon. The couple shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1903, and
she won the chemistry Nobel in 1911.
Marie Curie was a native of Poland, and Polish President Lech Walesa joined
Mitterrand at yesterday's ceremonies. Also present were Prime Minister Edouard
Balladur and Mayor Jacques Chirac of Paris, conservatives vying to succeed
Mitterrand in a two-round election that begins Sunday.
The woman they honored was born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867.
She came to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where she met her husband. With
their discoveries of polonium and radium, "they changed the face of the
world," 1993 Nobel Physics laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes told the Pantheon
ceremony.
During World War I, Marie Curie was involved in the first use of radiology
to treat the wounded and trained the army's radiologist nurses at what is now
known as the Curie Institute. The name "curie" is used today for the unit of
measurement of radioactivity.
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