Marie Skłodowska Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867.
Due to her family's financial problems she was initially unable to
attend university, instead training in a laboratory and studying at the
Flying University, a secret underground school that defied the ruling by
Russian authorities.
Eventually she ended up studying at the Sorbonne
in Paris, where she obtained Licenciateships in Physics and
Mathematical Sciences. She later married her husband Pierre, a Professor
at the school of Physics and it was with him that they both discovered
radium and polonium, earning them her first Nobel Prize for physics in
1903.
Her husband tragically died in a street accident in 1906, and in her
grief she continued her work, becoming the first female professor at the
Sorbonne and winning a second Nobel in 1911 for Chemistry.
Curie is the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different
sciences. A physicist and chemist, she coined the term "radioactivity"
to describe the phenomenon discovered by Henri Becquerel. She also
developed mobile X-ray units named "Little-Curies" during the First
World War.
She passed away from radiation exposure in 1934 after prolonged contact
with radioactive material over her many years of research. The lab she
worked in never had any protective measures in place to contain the
radiation, and she often walked around with radioactive isotopes in her
pockets, commenting that she enjoyed the way they glowed in the dark.
Her obsessive curiosity continued through their daughter, Irène
Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who also received a
Nobel Prize in 1935 for Chemistry. Curie's legacy lives on today through
Marie Curie Cancer Care, a charity bearing her name that fights cancer.
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