Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland. She moved to Paris to study at a university. Her first name was Maria, but when she registered at the Sorbonne, she began using the French name Marie. She chose uranium rays for her thesis because so little had been published on them. She measured that certain pitchblendes containing 75% uranium oxide were about four times as radioactive as uranium oxide. That suggested a small amount of a highly radioactive unknown material. In 1903, she became the first woman in France to receive a doctoral degree. At her thesis defense, her examiners exclaimed that her research contributed more to scientific knowledge than any previous thesis project.

She met Pierre Curie in 1894, and they married in 1895. The Curies used a simple method to find new elements. They separated pitchblende into chemical parts. Each chemical separation was followed by a measurement of the activity of the products. Pitchblende is made of up to 30 different elements, so this was slow work. In July 1898, they reported that the bismuth part held a new element. It acted almost exactly like bismuth. But it was radioactive. So it had to be something new. Marie named it polonium after Poland, the country where she was born. In December, they announced radium. Other scientists did not trust either announcement. The Curies did not have enough of either element to see and weigh.

French academics first proposed only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel for the 1903 physics prize. Marie's nomination was nearly missed. A member of the nominating committee supported women scientists. He warned Pierre about it. Pierre replied that a prize for radioactivity that left out Marie's pivotal role would be a travesty. So in 1903, Marie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Henri Becquerel. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. In 1906, Pierre died in a street accident involving a horse-drawn vehicle. That year, Marie became the first woman to hold a professor's post at the Sorbonne. In 1910, she declined the French Legion of Honor. She asked only for the means to work.

In 1911, Marie won a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made a note of this. In the eleven years of the Nobel Prizes, it was the first time the distinction had been given to a previous prizewinner. Marie was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. In her Nobel lecture, she said that radium and polonium had been found by Pierre Curie in collaboration with her. She said the chemical work of isolating radium was carried out specially by her. As of November 2026, she is still the only individual to have received a Nobel Prize in two different science categories.

During World War I, Marie organized mobile X-ray teams, and her daughter Irène, a scientist, worked with her. The cars were nicknamed petites Curies, French for little Curies. Curie also organized the Radium Institute as an entire major laboratory devoted to a single subject. It had small research teams that each asked their own questions about radioactivity and trained students. Her staff always included some foreigners, especially Poles, and some women. Between 1919 and her death in 1934, scientists at the Institute published 483 works. Thirty-one of them were papers and books by Curie herself. In 1934, Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot made a radioactive element artificially for the first time.

The Curies did not fully understand how dangerous the radioactive materials they handled were. In 1925, Curie joined a French Academy of Medicine commission that recommended lead screens and periodic blood-cell tests for workers in industrial labs. Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934, of aplastic anemia, a blood disease that often results from exposure to large amounts of radiation. Her chemistry laboratory at the Curie Museum in Paris was reconstructed in 1981 and decontaminated. It was too radioactive for safe occupancy. As of November 2026, the European Commission sponsors the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, fellowships that support the career development of researchers. A notebook of Marie Curie's from 1899 to 1902 is still radioactive as of November 2026. The Nobel Prize site says it will be for 1,500 years.

Words to know

• thesis: a research paper
• travesty: a shameful result
• declined: said no to
• artificially: made by people
• decontaminated: cleaned of radiation