Dec 29, 2018 3 min read

You can count on one hand the people who have won two Nobel Prizes. You can count with one finger the women who have done it. Her name is Marie “Madame” Curie, and she was awarded her second Nobel Prize this week (Dec. 31) in 1911 for her work in the field of radioactivity. Madame Curie is regarded as the greatest woman scientist ever born, and she would still get many votes if you removed the adjective “woman.”

Born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland, as a young woman she moved to France to study chemistry and physics at the University of Paris. There she met and married Pierre Curie, a physics professor, and the two soon teamed up to conduct research on radioactive substances. Expanding on French physicist Henri Becquerel’s pioneer work in the field of radioactivity, the Curies shared with Becquerel the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for their work in radiation.

But the prize would come at great cost. In their experiments in their makeshift laboratory, the Curies often handled radioactive materials with their bare hands, and constantly breathed radioactive dust. By 1906, Pierre was suffering from radiation sickness (he died when a horse-drawn carriage crushed his skull), and at one time or another their daughter Irene, her husband, and several lab assistants all suffered from radiation-related exposure. Undaunted, she continued her experiments and earned her second Nobel – this time in chemistry – for her discovery of radium and polonium (which she originally discovered in 1898), two highly radioactive elements.

Madame Curie continued to work until she died in 1934 of a leukemia that no doubt resulted from her years working in highly radioactive conditions. Today her scientific legacy includes the discovery of radium and its practical use in killing diseased human cells, the study of radiology, and the use of X-rays for internal medicine. She even contributed to a proper understanding of the structure of the atom, arguably the most important scientific breakthrough of the 20th century.

She also founded the Radium Institute in Paris and was its first director, and she became the first ever female professor at France’s premier institute of higher learning, La Sorbonne.

Most of all she proved a woman could succeed in a field dominated by men. She is the second woman buried in the Pantheon in Paris – that centuries-old memorial to the nation’s “great Frenchmen” – but she was the first woman whose life accomplishments, her contribution to science, earned her that honor.

Still, perhaps her greatest legacy is that her daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, followed in her footsteps, winning, with her husband, Frederic, her own Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935. That’s a lot of Nobel Prizes for one family.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.