Marie Curie 1867 – 1934

Biography

Marie Curie did what no scientist before or since has matched: she won the Nobel Prize twice, in two different sciences. The Polish-born physicist and chemist shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on radioactivity, then won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone for discovering radium and polonium. Working in a leaking shed with her husband Pierre, she founded the science of radioactivity and opened the door to modern medicine and physics. She died of aplastic anemia on July 4, 1934, at 66 — an illness widely linked to her years of unprotected radiation exposure. She rests in the Panthéon in Paris, among France’s greatest. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and remains the only person ever to win in two different sciences. Her notebooks from the radium years are still too radioactive to handle without protection, stored in lead-lined boxes in Paris.