10 Lei IYC

The International Year of Chemistry, commemorated here, marked the centenary of Marie Curie's 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — her second Nobel, awarded less than two years after her husband Pierre's death and during a period when the French press was actively campaigning to have her expelled from the Académie des Sciences on the grounds that she was a woman and a foreigner. Romania has a particular claim on the occasion: Curie was born in Warsaw, but her scientific lineage runs through French institutions that had deep ties to Romanian students studying abroad in the early twentieth century.