Maria Sklodowska was born in Warsaw under Russian occupation, in a country that
did not officially exist. Women were not permitted to attend university in Poland.
She and her sister made a pact: one would work to support the other through
university, then they would switch. Maria worked as a governess for years,
sending money home. Then she went to Paris, enrolled at the Sorbonne, and finished
first in her physics degree.
She met Pierre Curie when she needed a laboratory. He was already a distinguished
physicist. He offered her space to work. They married in 1895 and became
the most productive scientific partnership of the age. They worked in a converted
shed with a leaking roof, processing tons of pitchblende by hand, in conditions
that would today require full hazmat protocols. They discovered polonium and radium
in 1898. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903.
Pierre was killed by a horse-drawn cart in 1906. Marie took over his professorship
at the Sorbonne — the first woman to hold a chair there — and continued working.
When her relationship with physicist Paul Langevin became public in 1911, the French
press denounced her as a foreign Jew and a homewrecker. She was neither. She was in
Stockholm collecting her second Nobel Prize. She remains the only person to win
Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia caused by decades of radiation exposure.
Her personal notebooks, her cookbooks, her furniture — all remain radioactive.
They are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Researchers who wish to view them must sign a waiver and wear protective clothing.
