Marie Curie

Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. A physicist and chemist who later became a French citizen, she is best known for her groundbreaking work on radioactivity—a term she herself coined. In 1903, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, for their joint investigation of the radioactivity phenomena that Henri Becquerel had discovered. Eight years later, in 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the elements radium and polonium, isolating radium, and studying its nature and compounds.

Curie made history as the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and the only person to claim Nobels in two separate scientific fields. She and Pierre were also the first married couple to win a Nobel, starting a family tradition that would accumulate five Nobel Prizes. In 1906, she became the first woman appointed as a professor at the University of Paris.

Her early life in Warsaw was marked by hardship. She was the youngest of five children born to teachers Bronisława and Władysław Skłodowski. The family had lost their wealth due to their involvement in Polish uprisings for independence. Her father, a mathematics and physics teacher, brought laboratory equipment home after Russian authorities banned lab instruction in schools. Her mother ran a boarding school but died of tuberculosis when Marie was ten; her eldest sister, Zofia, had died of typhus three years earlier. These losses led Marie to abandon Catholicism and become agnostic.

After graduating from a girls' secondary school with a gold medal in 1883, she spent time recovering from what may have been depression. Unable to attend university as a woman, she joined the clandestine Flying University, a Polish patriotic institution that accepted female students. To help her sister Bronisława study medicine in Paris, Marie worked as a tutor and governess, including two years with the Żorawski family, where she fell in love with their son, Kazimierz. She eventually followed Bronisława to Paris in 1891, earning her higher degrees there. She married Pierre Curie in 1895, and together they conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. Pierre died in 1906 after being struck by a vehicle in the street.

Under Curie’s direction, the first studies using radioactive isotopes to treat neoplasms were carried out. She founded the Curie Institute in Paris in 1920 and another in Warsaw in 1932, both of which remain major medical research centers. During World War I, she created mobile radiography units to bring X-ray services to field hospitals.

Despite becoming a French citizen, Curie never lost her Polish identity. She taught her daughters Polish and visited Poland with them. She named the element polonium after her homeland. She died on 4 July 1934 at a sanatorium in Passy, France, at age 66, from aplastic anemia likely caused by her long exposure to radiation during research and wartime radiology work.

Beyond her Nobel Prizes, Curie received many honors. In 1995, she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Paris Panthéon. Poland declared 2011 the Year of Marie Curie during the International Year of Chemistry. Her life has been the subject of many biographies, including one by her daughter Ève. The synthetic element curium is named in her honor.