LOVE AND SCIENCE

SCIENTIST | DOUBLE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER | RESEARCHER

On the list of top scientists ever to exist, including Einstein, Galileo, Tesla, Darwin, Aristotle, and Pasteur to name a few, there is only one female among them, Marie Curie. 

Marie’s relentlessness and curiosity drove every decision, many of which were unorthodox and socially radical, and as a result, she broke many gender barriers during her lifetime.

Before World War 1, France was at the peak of its rising sexism, xenophobia, and antisemitism. Even so, Marie attended university at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman to receive a PhD from a French university. She then went on to become the first female professor at the University of Paris. 

Marie and her husband Pierre, with whom she shared love and a laboratory, discovered Polonium, named after Marie’s homeland of Poland, and Radium. For this work, she shared the Nobel Prize with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, making Marie the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.  After her husband Pierre’s tragic death, Marie won a second Nobel Prize for her treatise on radioactivity and the isolation of pure radium. As a result, she was the first person to be awarded Nobel Prizes in two scientific categories – physics and chemistry.  She remains one of only two even now.

For all her intelligence, Marie did not understand the long-term danger of the radioactive materials used in the laboratory. Marie Curie died from leukemia at 66, likely caused by radiation exposure. Most of her papers are too radioactive to touch so they are stored in lead boxes.  

Untouchable, like Marie.