Marie Curie

She was the first person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes.

Marie Curie grew up in Russian-occupied Poland where women were banned from higher education.

So she joined a secret underground network called the Flying University.

Changing locations constantly to avoid detection.

At 24, she left Poland for Paris.

She enrolled at the Sorbonne. Earned her first degree in physics. Then her second in mathematics.

In 1894, she met Pierre Curie, already a well-respected physicist.

She needed lab space. He had a modest one to share.

Their scientific minds connected immediately.

They got married in 1895.

Marie’s PhD focused on uranium rays.

Using Pierre’s electrometer, she found some minerals were more radioactive than pure uranium.

So the radiation couldn’t come from chemical composition. It had to come from the atoms themselves.

A direct hit to the idea that atoms were indivisible.

In 1898, she discovered polonium.

Later that year, she and Pierre announced the discovery of radium.

She coined the term “radioactivity.”

And then got to work isolating the elements, processing tons of pitchblende in a leaky shed.

It took her four years to extract one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride.

Between 1898 and 1902, she and Pierre published 32 scientific papers.

In one of them, they revealed that radium killed tumor cells faster than healthy ones.

In 1903, Marie received the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Becquerel.

But the original nomination only included the men.

It was Gösta Mittag-Leffler (a Swedish mathematician) who flagged the oversight.

Pierre threatened to reject the prize unless she was included.

That same year, she completed her PhD.

She became the first woman in France to earn a doctorate in science.

In 1906, Pierre slipped under a horse-drawn carriage and was killed instantly.

Marie was 38. Widowed. Raising two daughters.

The University of Paris offered her Pierre’s teaching post.

She accepted and became the first woman professor in the university’s history.

By 1910, she had isolated pure radium metal and defined a new unit of radioactivity: the curie.

In 1911, she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, this time in Chemistry.

Then came World War I.

She built mobile radiology units (“Petites Curies”) and drove them to the front lines.

She trained nurses to use them.

She offered her Nobel medals to the French government to fund the war.

They refused.

So she bought war bonds with her prize money instead.

After the war, she founded the Curie Institute in Paris.

She trained the next generation of scientists.

Four of them won Nobel Prizes, including her daughter Irène and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

She toured the U.S. in 1921, raising funds to buy radium for her lab.

She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia, likely caused by her prolonged exposure to radiation.

When her body was exhumed in 1995 to be interred in the Panthéon, it was still radioactive.