Musée Curie

The Curie Museum is on the ground floor of the Curie Pavilion, in one of the oldest buildings of the Institut Curie. This laboratory, erected a few streets away from the “shed” where the Curies discovered polonium and radium in 1898, was specially built for Marie Curie by the University of Paris and the Institut Pasteur between 1911 and 1914.

Here she pursued her work for nigh on twenty years, and here too her daughter and son-in-law Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered artificial radioactivity, for which they received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935.

The Curie Museum is the guardian of this institutional heritage, a place of memories and a repository of the history of science. It has a permanent exhibition and a center for historical resources. The exhibits retraces the history of radioactivity and its applications, notably in medicine, giving pride of place to the lives and work of Pierre and Marie Curie and of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The historical resources center holds archives and documentation on the history of the Curies and the Joliot-Curies and of the Institut Curie (archives of the Radium Institute and of the Curie Foundation), and more broadly the history of radioactivity and oncology.