Marie Curie spent the last twenty years of her life in a laboratory you can still walk through. It is the pavillon Curie of the Institut du radium, built between 1912 and 1915: a low brick building with a garden of lime trees in front of it, on a quiet street hardly anyone walks along, between the Panthéon and the Jardin du Luxembourg. Marie Curie’s office and her chemistry laboratory have stayed inside it, with the furniture in place.
The museum is free, with no booking, and that is the easy part. The hard part is the days: it opens only from Wednesday to Saturday, from 13:00 to 17:00, it closes for the whole of August and over the year-end holidays, and since the space is small the number of visitors is controlled, with a possible queue after 16:30. It is worth putting in the diary before you decide the rest of the day.
What is left today of a laboratory where radium was handled with bare hands?
Let’s begin!
1. Four days out of seven, and two different entrances
Where is the door?
I start from the detail that wastes the largest number of visits, and that is badly signposted on the spot. On weekdays you go in through the gate of the Campus Curie, at number 11 rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, and from there signs take you to the museum. On Saturdays, though, you go in at number 1 of the same street. If you arrive on a Saturday and insist on number 11, you find a locked gate and conclude that the museum does not exist.
On the length of the visit the museum is honest: it states fifty minutes on average, and that is realistic. This is a visit to slot in, not one to plan half a day around, and the museum is five minutes on foot from the Panthéon and ten from the Luxembourg.
2. The bureau, left as it was
From 1914 to 1934 Marie Curie ran the physics and chemistry laboratory of the Institut du radium from this room. The desk, the shelves, the light that comes in from the window onto the garden: it is all preserved, and the effect is not that of a museum reconstruction, but of an office somebody might come back to.
Look at the proportions of the room, because they say something. This is not the office of a world celebrity: it is what it really was, the head office of a university laboratory, with the furniture the administration handed out. Marie Curie already had two Nobel prizes when she sat down in it.
3. The chemistry laboratory, and the question you are asking yourself
Next to the office is the chemistry laboratory, the one she worked in for the last twenty years of her life. Benches, glassware and fume hoods make up the room where radioactive elements were separated from tonnes of ore.
Here you ask yourself the question, even if you do not say it out loud. Yes, it has been decontaminated. In 1981, with the support of the Ligue française contre le cancer, the small laboratory next to the office was cleaned up: the old sink and the remaining radioactive stains were removed, and then the room was put back together. Further operations followed in the 1990s, before the museum opened to the public in its present form. The museum keeps a page on its own site devoted to exactly this, whether the Musée Curie is radioactive, and the fact that the page exists already says how reasonable the question is.
4. The family with five Nobel prizes
In the first section of the route there is an interactive table on which photographs, documents and archive film open up, and it is the point where you should do the arithmetic. Pierre and Marie Curie, their elder daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie received, between them, five Nobel prizes.
Inside that number is a record still unmatched. Marie Curie remains to this day the only woman to have received two, and the only person to have received two in two different scientific disciplines: physics in 1903, chemistry in 1911. If that sounds like a textbook record, try thinking how many names come to mind to equal it.
One thing has to be said about the photograph above, because it is easy to misread: it dates from 1912 and it does not show these rooms. When it was taken the pavillon Curie was still a building site, and she was working in the laboratory on rue Cuvier.
5. Radium between myth and reality, and the anti-wrinkle creams
What happens when a scientific discovery turns into a fashion?
Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium in 1898. At the beginning of the twentieth century its properties struck the public as extraordinary, almost magical: radium gives off light on its own, a bluish green, and it had just been found to destroy certain tumour tissues. Writers, artists and above all traders threw themselves on that reputation, and began selling health products, anti-wrinkle creams and mineral waters with radium in them.
This section puts the panels and the objects of that season in a case, and it does so without easy irony. Awareness of the damage came later, and it came at a price: paid by the women who painted the luminous dials of watches, and by the scientists themselves. Marie Curie would die in 1934 of a disease of the blood.
6. The gram of radium that cost a hundred thousand dollars
In the central case of the third section are the restored instruments of the Curie method, the procedure for measuring radioactivity that Pierre and Marie perfected in 1898. Beside them are shown some of Marie Curie’s original papers.
And then there is the story of the American journey, which begins with an interview. In 1920 the journalist Marie Mattingly Meloney asked Marie Curie what she wanted, and heard the answer: a gram of radium, so that she could work. The laboratory did not have enough. Meloney then launched a fundraising drive among American women, put together a hundred thousand dollars in less than a year, and on 20 May 1921 president Harding handed over the gift at the White House. That day, though, Marie Curie did not receive the radium, which was still at the factory: she received a gold key, the one to the lead casket that would hold it. The museum shows a reconstruction of it.
In these same rooms, what is more, in 1934 Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered artificial radioactivity, and the following year they took the Nobel prize for chemistry.
7. The Fondation Curie, and the garden she wanted
The last section covers the half of the project people usually forget. The Institut du radium was not only a physics laboratory: it had a second laboratory, for biology and medicine, run by doctor Claudius Regaud, one of the pioneers of radiotherapy. The museum shows his drawings of cells, in reproduction.
In 1921 Marie Curie and Claudius Regaud created the Fondation Curie together and opened a dispensary to treat cancer patients. The panels explain the two radiotherapies available then, röntgentherapy and curietherapy, and they end on a series of prevention posters signed by famous poster artists, which are also the finest thing to look at in the whole room.
Before you leave, go through the garden. Marie Curie asked for it during the first building works of the institute, it has lime trees, rose beds and the historic buildings around it, and there are wooden benches.
In the middle of the garden is a bronze monument with the two busts side by side, on a brick base carrying the plaque Pierre et Marie Curie, découverte du radium 1898 and, on the stone, the sculptor’s signature. On the facade and among the flower beds there are also eleven portraits painted by the street artist C215, devoted to the Curies, to the Joliot-Curies and to some of their collaborators, plus two representations of the atom.
Practical information
Details checked on 26 September 2026 on the official site musee.curie.fr. Opening hours and closures change: check again before you go.
Tickets. Entry is free for everyone and cannot be booked. All the museum’s activities are free as well. Donations are left on the spot or online. Opening hours. The museum opens Wednesday to Saturday, from 13:00 to 17:00. The last admission is ten minutes before closing. Attention: since the space is small, admission is controlled and there may be a wait; on busy days entries are limited after 16:30. Closing days. In the second half of 2026 the museum closes on 11 November, from 1 August to 1 September inclusive and from 20 December to 5 January 2027 inclusive. Getting there. The address is 1 rue Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, but the entrance changes: on weekdays you go in through the gate of the Campus Curie, at number 11, and on Saturdays at number 1. The stops are Luxembourg on the RER B, Place Monge on line 7 and Cardinal Lemoine on line 10. Groups. From ten people up you go in by booking only. The museum answers on +33 (0)1 56 24 55 33 from Wednesday to Saturday, from 13:00 to 17:00. How long it takes. The museum states fifty minutes on average, and the garden asks for another ten.
Where to go from here
The Panthéon is five minutes away, and in the same quarter you will find the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution at the Jardin des Plantes and the Institut du monde arabe on the riverside. If the Paris of machines and instruments interests you, the Musée des Arts et Métiers keeps Foucault’s pendulum and Volta’s pile. And if you are looking for another Paris place where the history of the twentieth century is visited in the rooms where it happened, there is the Musée de la Libération at Denfert-Rochereau, with its bunker.
Photo credits: photograph of 1912 in the public domain; chemistry laboratory by The wub (CC BY-SA 4.0); office and case of instruments by Van Der Meulen Christofle (CC0); facade of the pavillon Curie by Chris06 (CC BY-SA 4.0); monument in the garden by GFreihalter (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
