Do we like Marie Curie?
Our score: 10 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in what we read, and the record shows her using her skills and her lab to help other people.
Marie Curie was a Skłodowska by birth and a Curie by marriage, and she is still billed both ways today. She built her life's work in Paris and died in 1934, aged 66. Everything else we know about her comes from what she did in between.
Start with the snub. On 23 January 1911 the French Academy of Sciences considered her for membership and rejected her. Her only rival, physicist Édouard Branly, won the seat, and the Academy did not seat a woman until Marguerite Perey in 1962. Eleven months later she picked up the 1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry anyway, which is a fairly sharp reply.
On the harm test, there is almost nothing to chew on. We found no harmful words, no campaigning against any group and no dodgy company in the sources we read. The record is thin on her opinions, so we are judging what she did. And what she did was open doors for other women.
Then the war. When World War I started she raised donors, cars and X-ray equipment, and had body shops fit out vehicles that soldiers nicknamed the “petites Curies”. She learned to drive and to fix a car, and she set up a training program at the Radium Institute so other women could run the machines. By the war's second year there were 200 radiological units at more permanent sites.
As for the court record, we found no case against her in the sources we read. We also found no allegations of mistreating anyone that stand up in established reporting, so the good-person test is the easy one.
The latest noise is about her name, not her conduct. The European Central Bank is weighing a banknote design that could carry her as “Marie Curie (née Skłodowska)”, and Polish critics say that undersells Poland's part in her story. The ECB says it is consulting historical and linguistic sources, and no final call has been made.