Marie Curie

Marie Curie was a Polish-French physicist and chemist who established the study of radioactivity, a word she coined, and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867 under Russian rule, where universities were closed to women, she attended the clandestine Flying University and worked as a governess to fund her sister's medical studies in Paris before following her there in 1891. She studied at the Sorbonne in poverty, and married Pierre Curie in 1895. Investigating Henri Becquerel's uranium rays, she established that the radiation was a property of the atom itself rather than of a chemical reaction — the insight that made the field. Working from tonnes of pitchblende residue in a converted shed, the Curies isolated polonium, named for her occupied homeland, and radium in 1898. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Becquerel, and was nearly excluded from it until Pierre insisted. After Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906 she took over his chair, becoming the Sorbonne's first woman professor, and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for isolating metallic radium. The French press attacked her that same year over an affair with the physicist Paul Langevin, and the Academy of Sciences had already refused her election. During the First World War she developed mobile radiography units — the petites Curies — and trained women to operate them, bringing X-rays to field hospitals and examining an estimated million wounded men. She refused to patent the radium isolation process, holding that science belonged to everyone, and so earned little from it. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia caused by her exposure.

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