Marie Curie

Their life

Physicist and chemist who discovered polonium and radium, coined the term radioactivity, and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences — achieved while facing persistent barriers as a woman in science.

Known for

• Discovery of polonium and radium
• Coining the term "radioactivity"
• Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry
• Mobile X-ray units in World War I
• Founding the Radium Institute
• First woman professor at the Sorbonne

The road they walked

She was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, the daughter of teachers, at a time when Poland did not officially exist — partitioned among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, its language and institutions suppressed by the occupying powers. Women were barred from the University of Warsaw, so she studied in secret at the underground "Flying University," and worked for years as a governess to save money and send her older sister to medical school in Paris, with the understanding that the favor would later be returned. It was a slow, disciplined route into science, built on patience rather than privilege.

She finally reached Paris in 1891, enrolling at the Sorbonne, living on almost nothing in a garret near the Latin Quarter, and graduating first in her class in physics. There she met Pierre Curie, a physicist working on crystals and magnetism; their marriage in 1895 became a genuine scientific partnership. Drawn to Henri Becquerel's puzzling discovery that uranium salts emitted energy on their own, Marie chose the phenomenon as her doctoral subject and gave it a name — radioactivity — treating it not as a curiosity but as a property of the atom itself, a claim that quietly overturned the idea that atoms were indivisible.

Working with tons of pitchblende ore in a converted shed, the Curies isolated two new elements, polonium (named for her occupied homeland) and radium, announced in 1898. The physical toll of that labor — and of the radiation itself, whose dangers were not yet understood — shadowed the rest of her life. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Becquerel, then, after Pierre's sudden death in a street accident in 1906, took over his chair at the Sorbonne, becoming its first woman professor. Her second Nobel, in Chemistry in 1911, made her the first person to win in two sciences, awarded even as she faced a bruising public scandal over her private life and open hostility from parts of the French academy. During the First World War she equipped and drove mobile X-ray units — nicknamed "petites Curies" — to treat wounded soldiers near the front, and later devoted herself to building the Radium Institute in Paris as a center for research and cancer treatment.

How their story ended

Marie Curie died in 1934 at a sanatorium in Passy, France, of aplastic anemia, a bone marrow failure now understood to have resulted from decades of unprotected exposure to radiation in her laboratories — the very substances she had discovered. She had continued working almost to the end, still directing research at the Institute she founded. Her notebooks, and even her body, remain radioactive today, a quiet, literal trace of a life spent at the edge of the unknown.

In their words

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Tables where Marie sits

The Inventors’ Bench

For chasing curiosity and building what doesn’t exist yet.

The Observatory

For rigorous discovery — evidence over authority, always.

The Scientist’s Bench

For rigorous thinking, failed experiments, and staying curious.

From the Journal