2 Nobel Prizes · 2 Elements Discovered · First Woman · Only Person in Two Sciences
November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934 · Warsaw, Congress Poland
She was denied university admission in her own country because she was a woman. She won two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences — the only person ever to do so. Her notebooks are still radioactive. You need protective equipment to read them. She was killed by the science she loved.
Five acts. Sixty-six years. The woman who broke every barrier and was destroyed by her own discovery.
In Russian-occupied Poland, women were barred from university. She attended one anyway — in secret, at night, in apartments that changed every week.
Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, the youngest of five children. Her father was a math and physics teacher; her mother ran a boarding school. Both parents valued education fiercely. But this was Russian-occupied Poland: the University of Warsaw did not admit women. Maria attended the clandestine Flying University — an underground institution that met in secret, rotating locations to avoid Russian police. She made a pact with her sister Bronia: Maria would work as a governess to fund Bronia's medical studies in Paris, and Bronia would then support Maria. For five years, she worked as a governess, sending money to Paris. In 1891, at age 24, she finally boarded a train to France. She registered at the Sorbonne as "Marie" and began the transformation that would make her the most decorated woman in the history of science.
In a converted potato shed with no ventilation and a leaking roof, two scientists discovered radioactivity and changed the world.
Marie met Pierre Curie in 1894 — a brilliant physicist who was studying magnetism. They married in 1895; her wedding dress was a dark blue outfit she could also wear in the lab. For her doctoral thesis, Marie chose to investigate Henri Becquerel's recently discovered uranium rays. Working in a converted shed at the École de Physique, she made a series of extraordinary discoveries: radiation was an atomic property, not a chemical reaction. She coined the word "radioactivity." She and Pierre isolated two new elements — polonium (named for her homeland) in July 1898 and radium in December 1898. To prove radium existed, they processed eight tons of pitchblende by hand over four years, yielding one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride. In 1903, she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, shared with Pierre and Becquerel.
Her husband was killed by a horse cart. The French press tried to destroy her. She won a second Nobel Prize anyway.
On April 19, 1906, Pierre Curie was killed instantly when a horse-drawn cart crushed his skull on a rain-slicked Paris street. Marie was devastated. She took over his Sorbonne chair — the first woman to teach at the university in its 650-year history. She poured her grief into work, finally isolating pure radium metal in 1910. Then the scandal hit. In 1911, the French press revealed her affair with physicist Paul Langevin — a married man. Mobs gathered outside her home. Newspapers called her a "foreign Jewish home-wrecker" (she was Catholic, but antisemitism was rampant). The Nobel committee privately asked her not to accept her second prize. She came to Stockholm anyway, delivered her lecture, and became the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
When World War I began, she loaded X-ray equipment into a car and drove to the front lines herself.
When war broke out in 1914, Marie Curie responded by building mobile X-ray units — retrofitted cars equipped with X-ray machines powered by dynamos. She drove the first one herself to the front lines. She trained 150 women as X-ray operators. The soldiers called the vehicles "petites Curies." Over the course of the war, her mobile units performed over one million X-ray examinations, helping surgeons locate shrapnel and bullets in wounded soldiers. She also donated her Nobel Prize gold medals to the war effort — the Bank of France refused to melt them. Her daughter Irène, just 17, operated X-ray equipment at the front alongside her mother.
Her fingers were burned. Her eyes were failing. Her bones ached. The radiation she had spent her life studying was destroying her from the inside.
Marie spent the 1920s directing the Radium Institute in Paris, training a generation of scientists, and touring the world. In 1921, she visited America, where President Harding presented her with a gram of radium — purchased by public subscription organized by journalist Marie Meloney. But her health was deteriorating. Decades of radiation exposure had devastated her bone marrow. Her fingers were scarred and burned. She wore thick glasses because her vision was failing. She refused to acknowledge that radiation was killing her — safety protocols in her lab were almost nonexistent. On July 4, 1934, she died of aplastic anemia at Sancellemoz sanatorium in the French Alps. The cause of death was listed as a blood disease. Everyone understood what had really killed her.
Partners, rivals, family, and the scientific establishment that tried to keep her out.
The most decorated female scientist in history. What gets celebrated. What gets overlooked.
Historian accounts, physics analysis, fact checks, and scene pitches from 178 contributors.
She discovered elements in a shed. You can help tell her story from anywhere.