"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
Marie Curie was born as Maria Skladowska in Warsaw, Poland on November 7, 1867. At age 16, she won a gold medal for graduating from secondary school and then started working as a teacher to help support her family. When she was 18, she worked as a governess and financed her sister through medical school with the money she received.
In 1891, Marie went to Paris and worked at a laboratory of the physicist Gabriel Lippman. There, in 1894, she met Pierre Curie, and they were married on July 25, 1895. In the summer of 1898, Marie and Piere discovered the element Polonium. A few months later, she and Pierre also discovered Radium. Marie also obtained pure metallic radium with A. Debierne and in 1903, Marie won the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with her husband and another scientist. She became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics.
Marie then introduced a different teaching method at Sevres, a school for girls, that was based on demonstrations of experiments. She was made chief assistant of the laboratory at Sevres in 1904.
On April 19, 1906, Marie's husband, Pierre, died, but she was still able to continue her scientific work. She became the first female head of Laboratory at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1906 and also received another Nobel Prize, this one in Chemistry, in 1911. She was the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes. In 1922, Marie became a member of the Academy of Medicine.
On July 4, 1934, Marie died of leukemia, probably caused by her exposure to radiation during her experiments. She had been a woman who had contributed much to the study of radioactivity, among other things. In 1995, her ashes were enshrined under the dome of the Pantheon in Paris, the first woman to be laid there for her own merits. In 1996, a movie debuted about her and her husband called "Les Palmes de M. Schutz." Marie has two craters named after her (one on the moon, one on Mars) as well as a NASA rover with her name. Her image is on many stamps and coins worldwide, though especially in Poland, her birth country.