19 Facts About Marguerite Perey

Marguerite Catherine Perey was a French physicist and a student of Marie Curie.

In 1939, Perey discovered the element francium by purifying samples of lanthanum that contained actinium.

Marguerite Perey was born in 1909 in Villemomble, France, just outside Paris where the Curie's Radium Institute was located.

Marguerite Perey earned a chemistry diploma from Paris' Technical School of Women's Education in 1929; while not a "degree", it did qualify her to work as a chemistry technician.

In 1929 at the age of 19, Marguerite Perey interviewed for a role as a personal assistant to Marie Curie at Curie's Radium Institute in Paris, France, and was hired.

Marie Curie took on a mentoring role to Marguerite Perey, taking her on as her personal assistant.

Under Marie Curie's guidance at the Radium Institute, Marguerite Perey learned how to isolate and purify radioactive elements, focusing on the chemical element actinium.

Marguerite Perey spent a decade sifting out actinium from all the other components of uranium ore, which Curie then used in her study of the decay of the element.

In 1935, Marguerite Perey read a paper by American scientists claiming to have discovered a type of radiation called beta particles being emitted by actinium and was skeptical because the reported energy of the beta particles didn't seem to match actinium.

Marguerite Perey decided to investigate for herself, theorizing that actinium was decaying into another element and that the observed beta particles were actually coming from that daughter atom.

Marguerite Perey confirmed this by isolating extremely pure actinium and studying its radiation very quickly; she detected a small amount of alpha radiation, a type of radiation that involves the loss of protons and therefore changes an atom's identity.

Marguerite Perey named the element francium, after her home country, and it joined the other alkali metals in Group 1 of the periodic table of elements.

Marguerite Perey graduated from the Sorbonne in 1946 with a Doctorate of Physics.

Marguerite Perey was made the head of the department of nuclear chemistry at the University of Strasbourg in 1949, where she developed the university's radiochemistry and nuclear chemistry program and continued her work on francium.

Marguerite Perey founded a laboratory that in 1958 became the Laboratory of Nuclear Chemistry in the Center for Nuclear Research, for which she served as director.

Marguerite Perey served as a member of the Atomic Weights Commission from 1950 to 1963.

Ironically, Marguerite Perey hoped that francium would help diagnose cancer, but in fact it itself was carcinogenic, and Marguerite Perey developed bone cancer which eventually killed her.

Marguerite Perey is credited with championing better safety measures for scientists working with radiation.

Marguerite Perey was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1962, making her the first woman elected to the Institut de France.