Marie Curie Science

Marie Curie (1867-1934) remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911), and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw (then Russian-controlled Poland, where women could not attend university), she moved to Paris in 1891 to study at the Sorbonne, working in poverty for years before completing two degrees. With her husband Pierre Curie, she discovered two new elements (polonium, named for her homeland; radium) and coined the term 'radioactivity.' The scientific impact: Curie's work established that radioactivity was an atomic property (not a molecular one), which helped lead to modern atomic physics; her isolation of radium (0.1g from 10 tonnes of uranium ore, through years of physically grueling chemical processing) enabled nuclear medicine; and her mobile X-ray units (the 'petites Curies') saved an estimated 1 million lives in World War I. The Académie des Sciences of France refused to admit her despite her two Nobel Prizes (she lost the vote by 2 votes in 1911, when newspapers ran antisemitic attacks — she was not Jewish, but the press confused her with a Jewish family). She died of aplastic anemia caused by decades of radiation exposure, carrying test tubes of radioactive isotopes in her pockets without protection.