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The demolition of Marie Curie’s Paris Institute has been temporarily halted as campaigners fight to have the building designated as a historic monument.
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist’s laboratory at 26 Rue Ulme in Paris’ Latin Quarter was scheduled to be bulldozed on Monday, but France’s Culture Minister Rima Abdel Malak intervened to stop it.
Malak announced a “temporary moratorium” on demolition after consulting with property owner Institut Curie to consider “possible alternatives.” The Guardian newspaper reported.
The last-minute intervention came after people petitioned President Emmanuel Macron and other government departments to preserve the laboratory and the surrounding lime and sycamore trees planted by Curie.
Campaign leader Baptiste Gianceri called the last-minute news “excellent” but said the work was far from over.
“Unless the building is classified as a historic monument, the threat is not completely gone. So we have to keep the pressure on,” he said, according to the Guardian. “If Emmanuel Macron does not understand that this building is not just a historical monument, it is one of the last symbols of Marie Curie, the most famous woman of our time. That would be a grave mistake. I can’t think of that.”
Gianeseli argued that as buildings associated with French chemist Louis Pasteur were protected, Marie Curie’s building should also be protected.
Claudine Montille, who has written about the scientist, said Marie Curie was a “source of inspiration for women around the world” and that her laboratory was a “world heritage site”.
“I don’t think they understand what it means symbolically. Marie Curie is the most famous female scientist in the world, which is helpful and inspirational,” she said. Told.
Marie Curie moved to France at the age of 24 to study at the Sorbonne, where she later became a professor.
The scientist is best known for her and her husband’s discovery of radium from uranium, for which they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. She won her second Nobel Prize in Chemistry a few years later.
Her laboratory was built in 1909 in collaboration with the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris.
The building facing demolition is one of three that made up the Radium Institute, now known as the Curie Institute. She used it to prepare radioactive materials for research.
While in Paris, she developed a mobile X-ray machine and contributed to the development of radiation for cancer treatment.
Marie Curie’s villa in Saint-Rémy-les-Chebreuse was purchased by a Polish billionaire in 2022, a year after the Polish government announced its purchase of the property.
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