Marie Curie

Marie Curie, born Maria Skłodowska, was born in 1867 in Warsaw under Russian rule, the youngest of five children in a family of teachers. Her youth was shadowed by a double oppression: the private grief of losing a sister and her mother, and the twin barriers of being a subject of an occupied nation and a woman—for in that era, the universities were not open to Polish women. Brilliant yet with no place to study, she could only drink in knowledge in secret at the clandestine 'Flying University,' and went to the countryside to work as a governess, using her meager wages to support her sister studying medicine in Paris, on a promise that they would one day make each other's way. This resilience—gritting her teeth in adversity and treating the pursuit of knowledge as a faith—defined her whole life.

In 1891 she finally boarded the train to Paris, living on bread and tea through her lean years at the Sorbonne, yet earning degrees in physics and mathematics one after another with distinction. Here she met Pierre Curie—both her husband and her lifelong scientific partner. After they married, Marie took up as her doctoral research the uranium rays discovered by Becquerel, and in a crude shed processed tons of pitchblende residue, isolating from it the two new elements polonium and radium, and coining the very concept of 'radioactivity.' It was an expedition of body and mind that cost almost her very flesh.

The 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics made her the first woman ever to receive that honor. But the summit of fame was followed hard by searing pain: in 1906, Pierre was struck down and killed by a horse-drawn carriage on a Paris street, and in a single night she lost her love and her partner. She did not sink into grief, but took over Pierre's professorship, becoming the first woman professor in the history of the Sorbonne, and in 1911 won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on her own—still to this day the only person crowned twice in the two fields of physics and chemistry.

Glory was never the whole of her story. Being passed over for the French Academy of Sciences and the storm of public opinion whipped up by the media over her private life all made her taste the extra price an outstanding woman had to pay in that era. But she always turned her gaze toward a more concrete good: after the First World War broke out, she personally organized and drove mobile radiological vehicles equipped with X-ray apparatus, going to the front to help treat the wounded—vehicles the soldiers affectionately called 'little Curies.'

After the war she returned to the radium institute she had helped build, making it a world center of radioactivity research and training a new generation of scientists, including her own daughter. Long companionship with radioactive substances, whose harm she did not know, finally eroded her body, and in 1934 she died of aplastic anemia. What she left the world was not only two elements and two Nobel Prizes, but a stance: to believe, steadfastly amid prejudice and want, that 'nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood.'