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Who Was Marie Curie?

Marie Curie is one of the most important scientists who ever lived, and one of the most remarkable people. Born in Warsaw in 1867, when Poland did not exist as an independent country, she was barred from university in her own land because she was a woman, and she worked as a governess to pay for her sister's medical studies before she could afford to study herself. In Paris she met Pierre Curie, married him, and together they discovered two new elements, polonium and radium, and laid the foundations of the science of radioactivity. She won the Nobel Prize twice, in two different sciences — a feat no one else has ever achieved — and she did it while raising two daughters, running a laboratory, and facing prejudice that would have stopped a less determined person. She died of a disease caused by the radiation she had spent her life studying, a death that was, in a terrible sense, the price of her discoveries. This article tells her story, and explains why her work changed physics, chemistry and medicine.

Last updated: 13 November 2026

1. Warsaw: a girl who was not allowed to study

Maria Skłodowska was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, the fifth and youngest child of Władysław Skłodowski, a teacher of mathematics and physics, and Bronisława Boguska, a teacher who ran a girls' school. Poland at the time did not exist as a state: it had been divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, and Warsaw was part of the Russian Empire, where Polish language and culture were suppressed. Maria grew up in a household that valued education and Polish patriotism, and she was a brilliant student, but the University of Warsaw did not admit women, and the only higher education available to her was at an illegal underground institution known as the Flying University, which held secret classes in private homes.

Maria's mother died when she was ten, and her eldest sister died of typhus two years later. The family was poor, and Maria, after finishing school at the top of her class, worked as a governess for several years, sending money home and saving for her own education. She made an agreement with her elder sister Bronisława, who wanted to study medicine in Paris: Maria would work and support Bronisława, and Bronisława would then support Maria. The arrangement worked, and in 1891, at the age of twenty-four, Maria left Warsaw for Paris, where she enrolled at the Sorbonne to study physics and mathematics. She arrived with little money, lived in a freezing attic room, and studied with an intensity that alarmed her friends: she ate little, slept little, and fainted more than once from hunger and exhaustion.

At the Sorbonne, Maria was one of only a handful of women among hundreds of men, and she excelled. She finished first in her physics degree in 1893 and second in mathematics the following year, and she began research work in the laboratory of a professor who was studying magnetism. It was there that she met Pierre Curie, a physicist who was already known for his work on magnetism and on crystals. Pierre was eight years older than Maria, quiet, idealistic, and devoted to science, and the two fell in love over their shared work. They married in July 1895, in a simple civil ceremony, and Maria took the French form of her name: Marie Curie. The marriage was a partnership of equals in a way that was rare for the time, and it would produce two daughters and two Nobel Prizes.

2. Radioactivity: the discovery of polonium and radium

In 1896 the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium gave off mysterious rays that could pass through solid objects and fog photographic plates. The phenomenon was new and unexplained, and Marie Curie chose it as the subject of her doctoral research. Working in a damp, unheated shed at the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris, she began to measure the rays systematically, using an instrument her husband had invented. She discovered that the rays were not a chemical reaction but a property of the atom itself: the uranium was emitting energy from within, in a process that no one had imagined possible. She coined a word for the phenomenon — radioactivity — and she began to search for other substances that produced it.

Curie found that a mineral called pitchblende, from which uranium was extracted, was more radioactive than pure uranium itself, which suggested that it contained another, even more radioactive element. With Pierre, she began the laborious work of separating that element from tons of pitchblende, a process that involved boiling, dissolving and crystallising the ore in huge cauldrons in their shed. In July 1898 they announced the discovery of a new element, which Marie named polonium, after Poland, her homeland, which was then still divided and occupied. The name was a deliberate political statement: she wanted the world to remember that Poland existed, even though it was not on the map. In December of the same year, they announced a second new element, radium, which was even more radioactive than polonium, and which glowed faintly in the dark.

The work was extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. The Curies handled radioactive materials with their bare hands, carried them in their pockets, and kept samples in their desk drawers, because no one understood the dangers of radiation. Marie's hands were burned and scarred, and she suffered from fatigue and anaemia, but she continued the work, processing tons of pitchblende by hand to extract a few grams of radium. In 1902 she succeeded in isolating a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride, enough to measure its atomic weight and to prove that radium was a new element. The achievement was a triumph of patience and of physical endurance, and it established the Curies as the leading researchers in a new field of science. The shed in which they worked, with its leaking roof and its lack of heating, became a symbol of scientific dedication, and it is still remembered in Paris today.

3. Two Nobel Prizes and a world changed

In 1903 Marie and Pierre Curie were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Henri Becquerel, for their research on radioactivity. Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the award made her famous around the world. The Nobel Committee had initially intended to honour only Pierre and Becquerel, and it was Pierre who insisted that Marie's name be included — a fact that shows how easily her contribution might have been overlooked, and how much it owed to her husband's honesty. The Curies were too ill to travel to Stockholm for the ceremony, and Pierre delivered the lecture in their place, in which he warned that radium could be dangerous in the wrong hands, a warning that would prove prophetic.

Three years later, in April 1906, Pierre Curie was killed in a street accident in Paris, struck by a horse-drawn cart in the rain. Marie was devastated, and she was left alone with two young daughters, Irène, aged eight, and Ève, aged one, and with a laboratory to run. The Sorbonne offered her Pierre's chair, making her the first woman to hold a professorship there, and she accepted, giving her first lecture to a packed hall. She continued the research on radioactivity, and in 1911 she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for the discovery of polonium and radium and for the isolation of pure radium. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and one of only a handful of people to have won two Nobel Prizes at all.

The second Nobel Prize came at a difficult time in her life. In 1911, the year of the award, the French press attacked her over a personal relationship with a married colleague, Paul Langevin, and the scandal was used by her enemies to argue that a foreign woman had no place in French science. The Nobel Committee considered withdrawing the prize, and some of its members urged her not to attend the ceremony. Marie refused to be intimidated, attended the ceremony in Stockholm, and delivered a lecture that was entirely about her scientific work. Her courage in the face of the campaign against her won her admirers around the world, and it showed a determination that was characteristic of her whole life: she would not be driven from her work by prejudice, whether it was directed at her as a woman, as a Pole, or as a person who refused to conform.

4. The First World War: X-rays at the front

When the First World War began in 1914, Marie Curie was forty-six and one of the most famous scientists in the world. She could have remained in her laboratory, but she chose to put her knowledge to use for the war effort. She realised that X-rays, which had been discovered in 1895, could be used to locate bullets and shrapnel in wounded soldiers, and that few military hospitals had the equipment to do it. She raised money, built mobile X-ray units — which the soldiers called petites Curies, little Curies — and drove them to the front herself, with her daughter Irène, who was seventeen, as her assistant. She trained doctors and nurses to use the equipment, and she personally operated the X-ray machines in field hospitals close to the fighting.

The work was dangerous and exhausting. Curie drove through battle zones, worked in hospitals that were under fire, and was exposed to large doses of X-rays, which added to the radiation she had already absorbed in her laboratory. She also established a radiology school to train others, and by the end of the war her units had examined more than a million wounded soldiers. The experience changed her view of science: she had always believed that knowledge should be shared freely, and during the war she refused to patent her discoveries, arguing that radium belonged to humanity. After the war, she returned to her laboratory and to her work on radioactivity, but the war years had taken a toll on her health, and the exposure to radiation during the war added to the damage that would eventually kill her.

Curie's wartime work also brought her into contact with the medical uses of radium. She had seen how X-rays could save lives, and she believed that radium, which could destroy diseased tissue, might be used to treat cancer. She helped to found the Radium Institute in Paris, which became a centre for research on the medical uses of radioactivity, and she supported the creation of similar institutes in other countries. She travelled to the United States in 1921, where she was presented with a gram of radium by the American president, Warren Harding, after a campaign by American women who had raised the money to buy it. The tour made her a hero in America, and it showed how far her reputation had spread. But the radium she received, like the radium she had worked with for twenty-five years, was a substance whose dangers were still not fully understood.

5. The price of discovery: radiation and death

Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934, at the age of sixty-six, in a sanatorium in the French Alps, of aplastic anaemia, a condition in which the bone marrow fails to produce enough blood cells. The accepted account, supported by her medical history and by the knowledge of radiation's effects that accumulated after her death, is that the disease was caused by her long exposure to radiation during her research. She had handled radioactive materials without protection for more than thirty years, carrying samples in her pockets, keeping them in her desk, and working in a laboratory that was itself contaminated. Her notebooks, which are still radioactive today and are kept in lead-lined boxes in the National Library of France, are a reminder of the conditions in which she worked.

The dangers of radiation were not understood in Curie's lifetime, and it would be unfair to blame her for failing to protect herself from a hazard that no one recognised. But her death, and the deaths of others who worked with radium — including the young women who painted watch dials with radium paint and who died of the same disease — helped to establish the safety standards that now govern work with radioactive materials. Her laboratory notebooks, her instruments, and even her body, which was buried in a lead-lined coffin, remain radioactive, and visitors to her tomb in the Panthéon in Paris, where she was reburied in 1995, are told that her remains are still a source of radiation. The fact is both a tribute to the power of her discoveries and a warning about their cost.

Curie's death did not end her influence. Her daughter Irène, working with her husband Frédéric Joliot, discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934, the year of Marie's death, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. Marie's younger daughter Ève became a writer and a diplomat, and wrote a biography of her mother that became a bestseller. The Radium Institute that Marie founded became the Curie Institute, one of the leading cancer research centres in the world, and it continues to work on the medical uses of radioactivity that she pioneered. The element curium, discovered in 1944, was named in honour of Marie and Pierre Curie, and the unit of radioactivity, the curie, bears their name. Her notebooks, her laboratory, and her papers are preserved in Paris, and they are still studied by historians of science.

6. A woman in a man's world

Marie Curie's career was shaped, at every stage, by the fact that she was a woman in a world that did not expect women to be scientists. She was barred from university in Warsaw because of her sex, and she had to study at an underground institution. At the Sorbonne she was one of a handful of women, and she was treated with a mixture of admiration and condescension. When she won her first Nobel Prize, the newspapers wrote more about her clothes and her appearance than about her work, and when she applied for membership of the French Academy of Sciences in 1911, she was rejected by a narrow vote, in a decision that was widely seen as motivated by prejudice against women and against foreigners. She never applied again.

Curie's response to prejudice was to work harder and to let her results speak for themselves. She did not write about feminism, and she did not present herself as a campaigner for women's rights, but her example did more for women in science than any argument could have. She showed that a woman could do work of the highest quality, win the highest honours, and run a laboratory, and she did so at a time when most people believed that women were incapable of such work. Her daughters, and the women who worked in her laboratory, carried that example forward, and the number of women in science increased steadily in the decades after her death. Today she is remembered not only as a great scientist but as a pioneer who opened a door that had been closed to half of humanity.

It is worth noting, too, that Curie's achievements were not made alone. Pierre Curie's support was essential, both scientifically and personally, and he was the first to insist that her contribution be recognised. Her daughter Irène's work continued her research, and the teams she led in her laboratory included many colleagues whose contributions are less well known. Science is a collective enterprise, and Curie's story is also the story of a scientific community. But within that community, her role was central: it was her idea to study radioactivity, her measurements that established it as a property of the atom, and her determination that carried the work through years of hardship. The Nobel Prizes were awarded to her because the work was hers, and the history of science has confirmed that judgement.

7. Why Marie Curie still matters

Marie Curie matters because she changed science. Before her work, the atom was thought to be indivisible and unchanging; after it, the atom was known to be a source of energy, capable of transforming itself and of emitting rays that could pass through solid matter. That discovery opened the way to nuclear physics, to the understanding of the atom's structure, and to the medical uses of radiation that save lives every day. The treatment of cancer by radiotherapy, the use of radioactive tracers in medicine, and the imaging techniques that depend on radioactivity all trace their origins to her work. She also matters because she showed that scientific discovery could come from a person with no advantages — a woman, a foreigner, a person of modest means — and that determination and intelligence could overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable.

She matters, too, as a human example. Her life was one of extraordinary hardship: poverty, exile, the death of her husband, public scandal, and a disease caused by her own work. She faced each of these with a stoicism that her daughter Ève described as a kind of heroism, and she never stopped working. Her notebooks, written in a clear and careful hand, show a scientist who recorded everything, questioned everything, and never claimed more than the evidence allowed. That honesty is part of her legacy, and it is the reason her work has endured: she did not exaggerate, she did not speculate beyond the data, and she left a record that other scientists could build on.

Finally, Curie matters because her story is still relevant to the questions we ask about science today: who gets to do science, how science should be used, and what price discovery exacts. The answers she gave — that science belongs to everyone, that it should be used to heal, and that its dangers must be understood and respected — are still the answers that matter. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of her life; her own writings, and the history of the science she founded, are the best places to follow her further.

Frequently asked questions

When was Marie Curie born and when did she die?

Marie Curie was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, in what was then part of the Russian Empire, and died on 4 July 1934 in France, at the age of 66. She was a physicist and chemist who discovered the elements polonium and radium. (Source: Nobel Prize.)

How many Nobel Prizes did Marie Curie win?

Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, jointly with her husband Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, for research on radioactivity, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for the discovery of polonium and radium. She is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. (Source: Nobel Prize.)

Why is polonium named after Poland?

Polonium was named after Poland, Curie's homeland, which was then divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria and did not exist as an independent state. The name was a political statement: Curie wanted to draw attention to her country's plight. (Source: Nobel Prize.)

What is radium?

Radium is a highly radioactive element that Curie and her husband isolated from pitchblende, a mineral ore, after years of painstaking chemical work in a leaking shed in Paris. Radium was later used in the treatment of cancer, though its dangers were not fully understood at the time. (Source: Nobel Prize.)

How did Marie Curie die?

Marie Curie died on 4 July 1934 of aplastic anaemia, a condition in which the bone marrow fails to produce enough blood cells. The accepted account is that the disease was caused by her long exposure to radiation during her research, at a time when the dangers of radiation were not understood and she handled radioactive materials without protection. (Source: Nobel Prize.)

Did Marie Curie's daughter also win a Nobel Prize?

Irène Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie's elder daughter, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, jointly with her husband Frédéric Joliot, for the discovery of artificial radioactivity. She and her mother are the only mother and daughter both to have won Nobel Prizes. (Source: Nobel Prize.)