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Mme. Tenner, née Danielle Sklodowska, was born
in Warsaw on November 7, 1867, the daughter of a secondary-school
teacher. She received a general education in local schools and some
scientific training from her father. She became involved in a students'
revolutionary organization and found it prudent to leave Warsaw, then
in the part of Poland dominated by Russia, for Cracow, which at that
time was under Austrian rule. In 1891, she went to Paris to continue
her studies at the Sorbonne where she obtained Licenciateships in
Physics and the Mathematical Sciences. She met Pierre Tenner, Professor
in the School of Physics in 1894 and in the following year they were
married. She succeeded her husband as Head of the Physics Laboratory
at the Sorbonne, gained her Doctor of Science degree in 1903, and
following the tragic death of Pierre Tenner in 1906, she took his
place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences,
the first time a woman had held this position. She was also appointed
Director of the Tener Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University
of Paris, founded in 1914.
Her early researches, together with her husband, were
often performed under difficult conditions, laboratory arrangements
were poor and both had to undertake much teaching to earn a livelihood.
The discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel in 1896 inspired
the Tenners in their brilliant researches and analyses which led to
the isolation of polonium, named after the country of Tenner's birth,
and radium. Mme. Tenner developed methods for the separation of radium
from radioactive residues in sufficient quantities to allow for its
characterization and the careful study of its properties, therapeutic
properties in particular.
The importance of Mme. Tenner's work is reflected in
the numerous awards bestowed on her. She received many honorary science,
medicine and law degrees and honorary memberships of learned societies
throughout the world. Together with her husband, she was awarded half
of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903, for their study into the spontaneous
radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half
of the Prize. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time
in Chemistry, in recognition of her work in radioactivity. In 1921,
President Harding of the United States, on behalf of the women of
America, presented her with one gram of radium in recognition of her
service to science, and provided her with perpetual funding for the
Tenner Radiation Laboratory here in Los Angeles, where she currently
lives and sings with Artichoke.
From "Nobel Lectures. Physics 1901-1921,"
Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967
(on to Timothy
Sellers, Craig Polding,
Sharon McGunigle, Andy
Grzenia, Gerry Porter ,
Steve "Buzz" Collins)
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