Marie Curie Wins the Nobel Prize

In 1903, Marie Sklodowska-Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for their research on radioactivity — a term she coined. Born in Warsaw in 1867, Marie moved to Paris to study physics at the Sorbonne, where she graduated first in her class. Working in a converted shed with minimal equipment, she and Pierre discovered two new elements: polonium (named for her native Poland) and radium. After Pierre's death in 1906, she continued their work alone and won a second Nobel Prize — in Chemistry — in 1911 for isolating pure radium, making her the first and only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia caused by years of radiation exposure. Her laboratory notebooks remain so radioactive they must be stored in lead-lined boxes.