The Pierre and Marie Curie Museum—tucked quietly into the old Radium Institute on the campus of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris—is one of the most understated but important scientific museums in the city. It occupies the preserved laboratory spaces where Marie Curie, her daughter Irène, and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot carried out groundbreaking research in radioactivity from the 1890s through the 1930s. The museum is small, reflective, and resolutely authentic: nothing is dramatized, nothing staged. You stand in rooms where the Nobel Prizes were earned.
At the heart of the museum is Marie Curie’s office and laboratory, preserved almost exactly as they were at the time of her death in 1934. Wooden benches, glassware, electrometers, notebooks, and early radiation-measurement devices remain in their original positions. Unlike her early work in the makeshift shed on the Rue Lhomond, the Radium Institute was built specifically for her—funded by French, international, and American donors—to allow research into the medical and scientific potential of radium. It became one of the great centers of early 20th-century physics and chemistry.
The museum emphasizes both the scientific history and the human story. Panels describe Pierre and Marie’s partnership, Pierre’s accidental death in 1906, and Marie’s tireless continuation of their shared research. Other exhibits trace the later achievements of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, whose discovery of artificial radioactivity earned them the 1935 Nobel Prize—reinforcing the sense that this building housed not just a laboratory but a dynasty of scientific innovation.
For a visitor returning multiple times, especially after reading Dava Sobel’s biography, the museum gains emotional weight. Sobel’s portrait of Marie Curie—the discipline, the grief, the stubborn moral clarity—comes alive in the physical space. The rooms feel modest for the scale of the discoveries made there, and the lingering sense of danger from early radiation work is unmistakable.
The museum is quiet, intimate, and deeply respectful—a rare place where the history of science still inhabits its original walls.
