Polonium
She named the element after Poland, at the time erased from the map of Europe.
Adrian Grycuk — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl · Adrian Grycuk — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl · Adrian Grycuk — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl · Adrian Grycuk — CC BY-SA 3.0 pl
If her story interests you, or you are with children old enough to grasp what she did, yes — but set expectations: the museum is a small house with a few rooms of documents and instruments, not an interactive science centre. The visit is under an hour, and it sits on your route between the Old Town and the New Town anyway.
Of aplastic anaemia, a bone-marrow disease most likely caused by her long exposure to radiation. In her time the dangers of radiation were not understood, and she carried tubes of radium in her pockets and kept them in her desk drawer. Her notebooks remain radioactive today and are stored in lead-lined boxes.
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A house in the New Town where Maria Skłodowska was born in 1867, known worldwide as Marie Curie. Her life is exceptional by any measure: the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice, and the only person to win it in two different scientific fields — physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911. With her husband she discovered polonium and radium, naming the first after Poland, which at the time had been erased from the map. What preceded that deserves stating: women were not admitted to Warsaw's universities under Russian rule, so she studied at the clandestine Flying University held in private homes, then worked for years as a governess to fund her sister's studies in Paris on the understanding that her sister would later do the same for her. She left for Paris at twenty-four. In the First World War she equipped mobile X-ray units for the front lines. She died in 1934 of an illness caused by her long exposure to radiation. The museum is very small and the visit short.
She named the element after Poland, at the time erased from the map of Europe.
She studied at a clandestine university in private homes, universities being closed to women.
She equipped them herself for the front lines of the First World War.
Freta street, New Town