Marie Curie

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Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist, who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. 

Her father was an atheist. Her mother a devout Catholic. When she was seven, her sister died of typhus. Not so long after, when she was ten, her mother died of tuberculosis. Reflecting on the deaths of her mother and sister, she gave up Catholicism and become agnostic.  When she married Pierre Curie, ​in 1895, neither wanted a religious service.

Marie was known for her honesty and her moderate lifestyle.  She gave much of her Nobel Prize money to friends, family, students, and research associates. She chose not to patent the radium-isolation process so that the scientific community could do research unhindered. She insisted that monetary gifts and awards be given to the scientific institutions she was affiliated with rather than to her. She and her husband often refused awards and medals. Einstein remarked that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.

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Marie was born in Warsaw, in 1867, at a time it was a part of the Russian Empire. Her father taught science at secondary school there. When Russian authorities prohibited laboratory instruction in Polish schools, he brought their lab equipment home and taught his children how to use it. 

To build on this science foundation was difficult for Marie. She couldn't enrol in regular higher education because she was a woman. But she was able to continue studying with the Flying University, a clandestine Polish institute of higher learning that did admit women students. She graduated. And at 24, she went to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and went on to conduct the pioneering scientific research on radioactivity that made her famous.

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Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.  In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and physicist Henri Becquerel, for their pioneering work developing the theory of 'radioactivity' (a term she coined). She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium.

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She died in France in 1934, from aplastic anaemia, believed to have been contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation. Since then, she's become an icon in the scientific world and has received tributes from across the globe. In a 2009 poll carried out by New Scientist, she was voted the 'most inspirational woman in science'.