Polish billionaire Dominika Kulczyk has bought a property in suburban Paris that was frequently visited by Polish scientist and Nobel Prize winner Maria Skłodowska-Curie.
Kulczyk plans to turn the site into a “House of Sisterhood” that will act as “a meeting and work space for exceptional women from all over Europe”, announced her charitable foundation.
“Maria Skłodowska-Curie proved with her life that limitations do not exist,” wrote Kulczyk. “She showed that women can be leaders in the most difficult fields of science. They can show the directions the world will take for decades. She became a symbol of female strength and a harbinger of great change.”
Born Maria Skłodowska in Congress Poland – a state effectively under Russian control – in 1867, Skłodowska-Curie went on to become one of history’s greatest scientists. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two scientific fields.
Having moved to France in her twenties, she enrolled at the University of Paris in 1891 and it was in that city that she met her fellow scientist and future husband Pierre Curie. The two of them jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for their pioneering work on radioactivity (a word coined by Skłodowska-Curie herself).
After Pierre’s death in a street accident in 1906, Skłodowska-Curie continued her research, going on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium.
Polish scientist Marie Skłodowska Curie, the only person ever to have won a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, has been voted as the woman who had the biggest impact on world history in a poll by the BBC's @HistoryExtra magazine https://t.co/yFKD9F9SgN
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) August 9, 2018
Last year, a house in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse where Marie, Pierre and their daughters Ève and Irène spent summer holidays and weekends between 1904 and 1906 was put up for sale. Initially the Polish government announced that it would seek to the buy the property, but Kulczyk has now done so instead.
“We want to honour the legacy of Maria Skłodowska-Curie,” she said. “The home of the Polish Nobel Prize winner belongs to all mankind and is a natural meeting place for women whose work transcends all the barriers we know. I would like this place to be vibrant again, serving European science and culture.”
Kulczyk’s foundation has announced that the first expert appraisals of the condition of the building, which is listed as a French historical monument, and necessary works have already begun. Their completion is planned for 2025.
Among members of Kulczyk’s “Sisterhood” project are Polish film director Agnieszka Holland and Iryna Deshchytsia, the wife of the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland. The group has already been seeking to help women and children fleeing the war in Ukraine, reports Wysokie Obcasy.
Dominika Kulczyk is a Polish businesswoman, co-founder and the president of the Kulczyk Foundation, and the daughter of Jan Kulczyk, who was Poland’s richest man until his death in 2015. She was last year ranked by Forbes as the country’s fifth richest person, with an estimated wealth of 7.6 billion zloty (€1.7 billion).
Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.
