Marie Curie in the Middle School

I subbed today in science class at the middle school with sixth graders.  We watched a film about Marie Curie and followed the important meaning found in the movie through a teacher-prepared viewer guide.  I really enjoyed the movie (even 5 times.)  This woman was such a hero.  I had forgotten that it was World War I era and not World War II.  She and her late husband broke such ground in the field of diagnostic medicine with their use of applied radium for X-rays developing machines that could use tubes to X-ray and even treat people.  They forwarded the scientific world's knowledge of elements and wide use of those elements.  Sadly, they had to fight the military, scientific boards, prejudice, and the government to make their finds useful.  What more they could have done if they had been backed and believed.  Curie won two Noble prizes, never sought to profit from her work, lost her beloved husband to an accident, and lost her life to leukemia, induced by radiation exposure.  It made me wonder during this day that I worked what scientists stood in labs around the world searching, searching, searching for ways, cures, discoveries, methods, medicines, codes, and equations that could better our world.  This is for the them-you are heroes.