Maria Skłodowska-Curie i Ernest Rutherford – przyjaźń, współpraca i rywalizacja

For the first quarter of the 20th century, the Curie Laboratory and the Ernest Rutherford Laboratory were the two main research centers for radioactivity. Both dealt with the same field, but had different priorities from the beginning. The Paris laboratory focused on discovering and studying the properties of new radioactive elements, while Rutherford in his laboratories in Montreal, and later in Manchester and Cambridge, tried, above all, to explain the very nature of radioactivity. There was a clear competition between the two laboratories, which, however, did not preclude personal and scholarly cooperation between their heads of research, i.e. Maria Skłodowska-Curie and Ernest Rutherford. The article discusses the main topics of this collaboration, such as developing a radium template, assigning scientific terminology, organizing scientific conferences, and preparing students. In addition, a few passages were devoted to the private relations between both scientists, which had a direct impact on their collaboration.