In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Written in 1895, Alfred Nobel's will endowed prizes for scientific research in chemistry, physics, and medicine. At that time, these fields were narrowly defined, and researchers were often classically trained in only one discipline. In the late 19th century, knowledge of science was not a requisite for success in other walks of life.
I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.
By the end of the millennium, despite the continuing excitement of the field, almost thirty years of a detour from chemistry to medical imaging began to pall, and I changed my focus to a field of chemical research, just in time for my past to catch up with me in the form of a Nobel Prize. All detours should be so productive!
I wish to thank the Nobel Foundation for granting me the greatest honor to which a scientist may aspire.
This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.
My doctoral work was completed by the end of 1950 and, at the age of twenty-two, I joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an instructor in chemistry under the distinguished chemists Roger Adams and Carl S. Marvel.
The citation for the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry reads, 'for contribution to the knowledge of electronic structures and geometry of molecules, especially free radicals,' and therefore implies that the Prize has been awarded for a long series of studies extending practically over my whole scientific life.
In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.
In 1947 I defended my thesis on nuclear physics, and in 1948 I was included in a group of research scientists whose task was to develop nuclear weapons.
Ernest Rutherford's 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry wasn't given for the nuclear power station - he wouldn't have survived that long - it was given for showing how interesting atomic physics could be.