Maria Skłodowska, who would become Marie Curie, was born in Warsaw under Russian occupation, where Polish women were barred from universities. She moved to Paris in 1891, studied at the Sorbonne, and with her husband Pierre discovered polonium and radium, coining the term "radioactivity." She won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, the only person ever to win Nobels in two distinct sciences.
Curie's early life was one of quiet defiance. Poland's occupiers had closed formal higher education to women, so she attended a clandestine "Flying University," moving between apartments to avoid detection, before scraping together enough money — with help from her sister Bronisława — to enroll at the Sorbonne. She lived on bread, butter, and tea in an unheated Paris garret, at one point fainting from hunger, all while topping her physics cohort.
Her work with Pierre Curie on radioactive materials was conducted in a leaky shed the French Academy of Sciences hadn't thought worth heating; visitors compared it to a stable or a potato cellar. It was there, hauling and processing tons of pitchblende ore by hand, that she isolated radium and polonium, exposing herself to radiation levels that would eventually kill her — she died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, her lab notebooks still too radioactive to handle safely without protection today. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and the first woman to win any Nobel Prize at all.
Key people: Marie Curie, Pierre Curie