Marie Curie

Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish-born physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity, discovering the elements polonium and radium, and becoming the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (1903, jointly with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the discovery of radioactivity) and the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two distinct scientific fields (Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911 for the isolation of radium). Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw, Poland, she initially worked as a governess and schoolteacher before moving to Paris in 1891 to study physics at the University of Paris (Sorbonne); she met Pierre Curie in 1894, and they married in 1895, establishing a remarkably productive collaborative research program. Her systematic investigations (1898–1911) employing systematic fractional crystallization and careful quantitative analysis of ore residues—particularly pitchblende—revealed the existence of previously unknown elements with extraordinarily high specific radioactivity; she coined the term "radioactivity" and demonstrated that radioactivity is an atomic property, not a molecular phenomenon, thereby establishing it as a fundamental atomic process. Her discovery of polonium (July 1898) and radium (December 1898), isolated through the processing of tons of pitchblende residue, represented one of the most arduous experimental undertakings in chemical history and revealed that radioactivity involves the spontaneous emission of energy incomprehensible within nineteenth-century chemistry. After Pierre's death in 1906, she assumed his professorial position, becoming the first female professor at the University of Paris, and continued her investigations of radioactive elements and their properties. She established the Curie Institute (Institut Curie) in Paris and, during World War I, pioneered mobile radiography units ("petites Curies") for battlefield medical imaging. Her exposure to intense radiation throughout her career—insufficiently understood regarding its cumulative toxicity—contributed to her death from aplastic anemia in 1934.