She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in different sciences — and the Nobel committee tried to leave her off the first one because she was a woman.
Marie Curie was born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867, under Russian imperial occupation. Women were barred from universities in Poland, so she attended the illegal underground 'Flying University' while working as a governess, sending money to fund her sister's medical education in Paris with the agreement that her sister would return the favor. In 1891, at 24, she finally made it to Paris herself.
In her early laboratory years, Curie worked in conditions that would be considered dangerous by any modern standard. She carried radioactive isotopes in her pockets, stored them in her desk, and handled them with bare hands. She famously found the glow of radioactive materials beautiful. The notebooks she kept in the 1890s are still so contaminated they are stored in lead-lined boxes — researchers must sign a waiver to view them.
Working in a leaking shed with her husband Pierre, she discovered two new elements: polonium in July 1898 (named after her occupied homeland) and radium in December 1898. To isolate one gram of radium, she personally processed over a ton of pitchblende ore — years of backbreaking physical labor on top of her theoretical work.
When the Nobel Committee awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, they initially planned to honor only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. It was a Swedish mathematician who intervened and pushed for Marie's inclusion. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize — and then, in 1911, won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry, becoming the first person ever to win in two different scientific fields.
When Pierre was killed in 1906 — struck by a horse-drawn carriage while crossing a Paris street — the University of Paris offered Marie his professorship. She became the first female professor at the institution. She threw herself into work, and over the next decades the Radium Institute she directed would produce four more Nobel Prize winners, including her own daughter Irène.
During World War I, Curie invented mobile X-ray units — quickly nicknamed 'petites Curies' — and drove them herself to field hospitals near the front. She trained 150 women as X-ray operators and is estimated to have helped treat over one million wounded soldiers. She received no official government recognition for this contribution.
Marie Curie died on July 4, 1934, at 66, from aplastic anemia — almost certainly caused by a lifetime of radiation exposure, long before the dangers of radioactivity were understood. In 1995, her remains were reinterred in the Panthéon in Paris, making her the first woman to be entombed there on her own merits rather than as a spouse.