晨讀英語美文60篇34 Madam Curie to Be Permitted into the Pantheon
[00:00.00]Madam Curie to Be Permitted into the Pantheon
[00:08.15]On the eve of the International Women’s day on March 8th,1994
[00:13.85]French President Mitterrand made the announcement
[00:17.47]that Madame Curie was soon to be admitted into the Pantheon-
[00:20.90]the memorial hall of the French national heroes.
[00:24.82]The decision, though coming 60 years late,
[00:28.54]is a great inspiration and gratification to the people.
[00:32.25]Madam Curie, born in Warsaw,Poland in 1867,
[00:36.97]is a French professor of physics,
[00:39.39]and was taught the value of learning and raised to a patriot by her parents.
[00:44.53]Due to her gender,
[00:46.18]she was not allowed admission into any Polish universities
[00:49.78]after graduating from high school.
[00:51.84]Eventually, with the monetary assistance of her elder sister,
[00:56.02]she moved to Paris and studied chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne,
[01:01.60]where she became the first woman to teach.
[01:04.43]Although Marie was not as well prepared as her fellow students,
[01:09.36]through hard work she completed master’s degrees in physics
[01:13.51]and math in only three years.
[01:15.82]It was at the Sorbonne that she met Pierre Curie who became her husband later.
[01:22.16]Just think of the hardship she and her husband went through
[01:25.98]in those hundreds of days in a damp shed
[01:29.59]when they tried to extract pure uranium.
[01:32.97]Madame Curie had to bear both the endless obsessions of strict working style and serious attitude
[01:40.09]and the excessive heavy work which even a strong man would find hardly possible to endure.
[01:46.11]Such was her mental and physical burden that Mr. Curie had sighed and said,
[01:52.02]“the life we’ve chosen is really too hard.”
[01:55.06]When the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Pierre and Marie Curie in 1903,
[02:02.08]the great honor quickly changed their lives.
[02:05.35]Sorbonne University belatedly found funds for a laboratory
[02:09.61]and Marie Curie was hired as “laboratory chief”.
[02:13.24]Unfortunately, in 1906 Mr. Curie was killed in a traffic accident.
[02:19.24]“It is impossible for me to express the profoundness of the crisis brought into my life
[02:25.47]by the loss of the one who had been my closest companion,”
[02:29.08]Madam Curie said sadly.
[02:31.60]Crushed by the blow, she did not feel able to face the future.
[02:36.30]She could not forget, however, what her husband used sometimes to say,
[02:41.44]“Even deprived of me, you ought to continue our work.”
[02:45.93]She was left alone to bring up children and, at the same time,
[02:50.85]persisted in her giant research project on radium.
[02:54.47]She refused all the honors and titles that she deserved and buried herself in science research.
[03:02.12]She received a second Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911.
[03:07.15]So she became the first scientist in the world to win two Nobel Prizes.
[03:13.39]Since man’s civilization began,
[03:16.33]there have been very few women like Madame Curie
[03:19.74]who so perfectly combined the role of a scientist,a wife and mother.
[03:24.99]She joined with all readiness organization protecting the patents and copyrights
[03:31.09]and copyrights of her fellow scientists.
[03:32.96]She says that scientists need protection while in laboratories the way a child needs it,
[03:39.20]so that they may be free from the worries of material life.
[03:43.57]This, if we may say so,
[03:45.85]is Madame Curie’s transfer of maternal love to young scientists.
