Marie Curie

Marie Curie was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, when Poland had vanished from the map, its lands ruled by Russia. Girls were barred from the university there, so she studied at the secret “Flying University”, whose classes shifted from flat to flat to stay ahead of the police. For years she worked as a governess to pay for her sister’s studies in Paris; in 1891 her own turn came, and at the Sorbonne she lived in a freezing garret, once fainting from hunger during a lecture — and still graduated first in her physics class.

In 1895 she married the physicist Pierre Curie and chose for her doctoral research the unexplained rays Henri Becquerel had found coming from uranium. Measuring mineral after mineral, she showed that the rays depended only on the amount of uranium present: an atomic property, which she named radioactivity. Pitchblende, she noticed, was more active than its uranium content could explain, so hidden elements had to be inside. Working with Pierre in a leaking garden shed, she boiled down tonnes of the ore and in 1898 drew out two new elements: polonium, named for her occupied homeland, and radium. The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics made her the first woman laureate. When Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906, she took over his chair and became the first woman professor at the Sorbonne; in 1911 she won a second Nobel, this time in Chemistry, for discovering polonium and radium and isolating radium — and she remains the only person ever awarded Nobels in two different sciences.

When the First World War opened she saw that X-ray machines, then rare hospital luxuries, could save wounded soldiers if they could be taken to the wounded. She designed mobile X-ray vehicles, learned to drive and repair them herself, and put some twenty cars and about 150 trained women operators into the field — the vehicles the soldiers nicknamed petites Curies, “little Curies” — while the bank politely declined her offer to melt her medal down for the war effort. The price of her life’s work surfaced in 1934, when she died of aplastic anaemia after decades of handling radium unprotected, even carrying sample tubes in her pockets. Her notebooks are still radioactive: stored in lead-lined boxes at France’s national library, they may be read only by those who sign a safety declaration. The following year her daughter Irène won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, making the Curies science’s most decorated family.