Marie Skłodowska-Curie died ninety-two years ago. In 2026, she has never been more present. A building she once worked in is fighting demolition in Paris. Her name is about to be inscribed in gold on the Eiffel Tower. And the European Central Bank is preparing to put her face in your wallet. Three battles, three continents of consequence, one scientist’s ghost refusing to stay buried.
The Pavillon des Sources: A Laboratory Saved, Then Threatened Again
This art deco building in Paris’s fifth arrondissement, where Curie and her colleagues prepared and stored the radioactive sources that fuelled her Nobel Prize-winning research, has become the unlikely epicentre of a heritage war raging since January 2024, when the Curie Institute announced plans to demolish it for a five-storey cancer research centre.
The outcry was immediate. Stéphane Bern, France’s most prominent heritage campaigner, called it “a serious mistake.” Within days, then culture minister Rima Abdul Malak intervened to suspend the demolition. What followed was a year of salvage proposals: first, the building would be dismantled stone by stone; then a plan emerged to keep it in situ and integrate it into the research centre.
Then, on 25 November 2024, culture minister Rachida Dati classified the Pavillon as a monument historique – the highest heritage protection in France. Decontamination work, estimated at €1.8 million, was scheduled for April 2025.
But the story did not end there. In January 2025, new plans emerged to “encapsulate” the Pavillon within a modern five-storey structure. Heritage group SOS Paris filed a legal appeal, posing a question that cuts to the heart of the matter: “Who could have imagined that this exceptional heritage – linked to Marie Curie, the greatest French female icon alongside Joan of Arc – would be threatened by her own institute?”
The appeal drew support from Hélène Langevin-Joliot, Curie’s ninety-seven-year-old granddaughter, who has advocated for the site’s protection for three decades. The question is whether the physical spaces where Curie worked constitute a living memory that cannot be replicated, or whether scientific progress must always take priority over preservation.
72 Names on the Eiffel Tower – and Not One of Them a Woman
If the Pavillon des Sources represents the fight to preserve Curie’s material legacy, the Eiffel Tower project represents something more symbolic – and, in its way, more radical.
Since Gustave Eiffel inscribed the names of 72 French scientists on the tower’s first floor in 1889, the golden frieze has stood as a monument to scientific achievement – and to exclusion. Every one of the 72 names is male. Women were legally barred from university education in France until the Camille Sée law of 1880, and the Académie des Sciences did not admit a female full member until well into the twentieth century.
The answer came from an unlikely source. In August 2021, Benjamin Rigaud was working as a tour guide at the Eiffel Tower when a tourist asked where Marie Curie’s name was. “When I checked, I discovered that there were no women listed on the tower at all,” Rigaud told Sorbonne University’s magazine. “This really struck me.” Rigaud, a student at Sorbonne at the time, began researching whether notable women scientists existed during Eiffel’s era. He found a publication by the association Femmes & Sciences listing 40 remarkable women scientists, and noticed something remarkable in the tower’s plans: forty empty spaces on the second floor.
What began as one student’s observation became the Hypatia Project – named after Hypatia of Alexandria, the ancient mathematician – a five-year campaign involving Sorbonne University, the Femmes & Sciences association, and the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel (SETE). On 26 January 2026, the anniversary of the Eiffel Tower’s groundbreaking ceremony, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo unveiled a list of 72 proposed names of women scientists to be inscribed on the tower, directly above the existing male frieze, in the same 65-centimetre-tall gilded lettering.
“By honouring these women, we celebrate those to whom science owes so much and help inspire entire generations of scientists,” said Jean-François Martins, president of SETE. “The Eiffel Tower thus fully embraces its role as a beacon of humanism, faithful to the spirit that gave birth to it.”
Marie Curie heads the list, naturally. But she is joined by figures whose names deserve wider recognition: Angélique du Coudray, the eighteenth-century obstetrician who invented a life-size anatomical model to train midwives; Sophie Germain, whose mathematics underpins the very theory of elasticity that made the Eiffel Tower structurally possible; Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images revealed the structure of DNA; Alice Recoque, a pioneer of French computing who warned about the ethical implications of digital technology as early as the 1970s. The list spans nearly three centuries of scientific history, from the midwife to the artificial intelligence researcher.
The list must still be validated by the Académies of Science, Medicine, and Technology. Hidalgo wants the inscriptions completed before 2027. But the symbolic victory is already secured. “Women were present,” as the project’s supporters have noted. “They were calculating, observing, inventing, discovering. They were simply not named.”
Your New €20 Note May Feature a Nobel Laureate
The third front in the Curie renaissance is, in some ways, the most prosaic – and the most pervasive. In January 2025, the European Central Bank selected two themes for its first full banknote redesign in over a decade: “European culture” and “rivers and birds.” Under the cultural theme, the proposed €20 note shows Marie Curie in a classroom setting – not the lone genius in a laboratory, but the mentor, the educator, the woman who opened doors for others.
“We want to slightly change the vision of the euro so that everyone can see herself in it,” ECB president Christine Lagarde said in 2025. More than 360,000 people participated in an ECB survey to help select the themes, and a design contest launched in July 2025 invited graphic designers from across the European Union to submit proposals. The Governing Council is expected to decide by the end of 2026.
The choice of Curie for the €20 denomination is quietly significant. The twenty-euro note is the most widely used in the eurozone. Placing Curie on it would make her face one of the most reproduced images in European history, seen by hundreds of millions of people daily – and, for the first time, place a woman on a major euro banknote.
The Woman Behind the Myth
All three projects – the Pavillon, the Eiffel Tower frieze, the banknote – converge on a single question: what do we actually know about Marie Curie, beyond the mythology?
The answer, increasingly, is that we are only now beginning to understand the full scope of her contribution. In October 2024, science writer Dava Sobel published The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science, a biography that approaches its subject from an unusual angle. Rather than focusing solely on Curie’s discoveries, Sobel narrates her life alongside the 45 women who trained in her laboratory – figures like Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Ellen Gleditsch, the Norwegian chemist who became one of the first women to hold a full professorship in Europe.
“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,” Sobel writes. But the real story, she argues, is not just the discoveries. It is the network. Curie was, for decades, the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings. She drove a van outfitted with X-ray equipment to the front lines of the First World War. She refused to patent her discoveries, insisting that scientific knowledge belonged to everyone. And she mentored generation after generation of women scientists at a time when the scientific establishment regarded their presence as an anomaly.
The Kirkus Reviews called Sobel’s book “a lucid, literate biography, celebrating a scientific exemplar who, for all her fame, deserves to be better known.” The Financial Times described it as “a novel lens through which to view Curie’s story.” What emerges is not the martyred figure of popular imagination – the scientist killed by her own discoveries – but something more complex: a woman who understood that legacy is not just about what you discover, but about who you bring with you.
A Legacy That Refuses to Be Contained
There is a pleasing irony in the convergence of these three stories. Marie Curie spent her life resisting the idea that knowledge should be property – she refused to patent radium, she gave her discoveries freely. And now, in 2026, the fight over her legacy is fundamentally a fight about ownership. Who owns the Pavillon des Sources? The Curie Institute, which needs the space for cancer research? The city of Paris? The world, which regards Curie’s story as belonging to everyone?
Who owns the Eiffel Tower frieze? Gustave Eiffel chose 72 names and excluded half the species. The correction is not erasure but addition – a new frieze rising above the old, in the same gold, the same permanence. As the project’s supporters have put it: “Not an appendix. Not a footnote. A continuation.”
And who owns the image of Marie Curie on a banknote? Placing her on the most used denomination is an act of democratic reimagination – the scientist who gave her knowledge freely, now giving her face to the everyday transactions of 340 million people.
In the fifth arrondissement, the Pavillon des Sources waits for its fate to be decided by a court. On the Eiffel Tower, 72 names of women may soon join 72 names of men, written in gold above the city. And somewhere in the ECB’s design studios in Frankfurt, an artist is sketching a classroom scene with a Polish-born French physicist at its centre, about to become the most familiar face in Europe.
Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934, of aplastic anaemia caused by decades of radiation exposure. Her laboratory notebooks, still contaminated with radium-226, are stored in lead-lined boxes at France’s Bibliothèque nationale. They will remain radioactive for another 1,500 years. In 2026, the world is still catching up to what she understood all along: that some discoveries do not decay.
