Background
Marie Curie was a physicist and chemist who coined the term “radioactivity” and whose research into radioactive decay made her the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
The Nobel Prize in physics was followed by one in chemistry for her discovery of the elements polonium and radium. As of 2025, she remains the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes and the only person to do so in two different sciences (1440 Topics: Nobel Prize).
Early Life
Born Maria Skłodowska in 1867, her upbringing was shaped by the Partitions of Poland, when the Russian Empire annexed parts of Poland.
When Russian officials removed laboratory instruction from Polish schools, Skłodowska’s father—a mathematics and physics teacher—brought the lab equipment home and taught his children. Skłodowska became an exceptional student in mathematics and science, graduating from high school at 15.
Seeking to continue her studies, despite women being unable to attend higher education, she and her sister attended the Flying University. This illegal school offered courses taught by Polish academics in changing locations to evade Russian authorities.
Skłodowska worked as a private tutor and a governess—an in-home instructor—to help pay for her sister’s Parisian medical school, and by 1890, was saving money to join her in France.
Before leaving, she received practical training in a chemistry lab run by her cousin, who had been an assistant to Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table.
Nobel Research
Upon arriving at the Sorbonne in 1891, Skłodowska worked tirelessly to compensate for deficits in her education, to the point of fainting from going without eating. Within three years, she earned master’s degrees in physics and mathematics.
In the last year of her studies, she was introduced to Pierre Curie, an electromagnetism researcher whom she would marry in 1895. Foregoing a traditional bridal gown and adopting the French version of her first name, Marie Skłodowska Curie wore a dark blue gown to the ceremony that she would later use as a lab coat.
Fascinated by Henri Becquerel's accidental discovery that uranium emits radiation, Curie began investigating the phenomenon for her thesis (watch explainer).
Working out of “a cross between a stable and a potato shed,” she realized radioactivity was an intrinsic property of atoms—not the result of chemical or physical interactions, as was commonly believed—and identified thorium as radioactive.
The couple discovered polonium, named in honor of her homeland, and radium, named after the Latin word for “ray,” by isolating different parts of radioactive ores and analyzing the electricity created from the radiation of each (see the experiment).
Months after becoming the first woman in France to earn a doctorate, Becquerel and the Curies were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, despite the committee not nominating Marie until Pierre’s advocacy.
Medical Legacy
Before he died in 1906 and she earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1911, the Curies published papers showing how radium could kill cancer cells.
Seeing the potential of using radiation to identify injuries during World War I, Curie taught herself basic anatomy, how to drive, automotive repair, and how to operate X-ray equipment. With this, she developed a fleet of mobile radiology vans—“petites Curies”—and set up 200 radiology labs in field hospitals that treated an estimated 1 million soldiers.
After the war and until she died in 1934, Curie focused on campaigning for resources to improve the Curie Institutes in Paris and Warsaw, which she founded to advance medical research.
The remains of the Curies were transferred to the Panthéon—a mausoleum for prominent French citizens—in 1995 and encased in lead to contain their radioactivity. Their belongings are similarly stored in France’s national library (learn more).
