Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.
However, she also had to suffer horrific consequences for her breakthroughs in the field of radioactivity.
Maria Salomea Skłodowska, later known as Marie Curie, was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland.
She was the youngest of five children and grew up in a household that valued education and intellectual pursuits.
Her father, Władysław Skłodowski, was a math and physics teacher, while her mother, Bronisława Skłodowska, was a pianist and singer.
Both of her parents instilled in her a love for learning and encouraged her to pursue her interests.
Curie's early education was mostly informal, as women were not allowed to attend universities in Poland at the time. However, she continued to study on her own and eventually moved to Paris in 1891 to further her education.
She enrolled at the Sorbonne University to study physics, chemistry, and mathematics.
Despite facing discrimination as a woman in a male-dominated field, Curie excelled in her studies and graduated with a degree in physics in 1893 and a degree in mathematics in 1894.
In 1896, the French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts emitted rays that were similar to X-rays.
This discovery piqued Curie's interest, and she began conducting her experiments on uranium rays.
She found that the intensity of these rays was proportional to the amount of uranium present, which led her to believe that radiation was a property of the element itself, rather than its chemical composition.
In 1898, Curie and her husband Pierre Curie, a fellow scientist, announced their discovery of two new elements - radium and polonium. They named polonium after Curie's native country, Poland, and radium for its intense radioactivity.
Their discovery was a significant breakthrough in the field of science and earned them international recognition.
In 1903, Curie and her husband were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity. This made Curie the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.
In 1911, she received her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her isolation of pure radium.
To this day, she remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields.
Marie Curie passed away in 1934 as exposed to high levels of radiation during her research and did not take proper precautions to protect herself.
Her demise reason due to aplastic anemia, a condition caused by exposure to radiation.
Her body was so radioactive that it had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin. Before that, radiation also caused her to develop cataracts, leading to blindness.
Even today, her body is still radioactive and is placed in a coffin with a 2.5cm thick layer of lead inside to prevent radiation from spreading to the surrounding environment.
In addition, her belongings such as laboratory notebooks, were deemed too dangerous to handle and were placed in lead-lined boxes.
Marie Curie's laboratory notebook is dubbed a "treasure" of world science, currently preserved in a lead box in the French National Library.
This laboratory notebook is considered an extremely dangerous item because it is contaminated with radioactive Radium 226, which has a half-life of up to 1,600 years.
However, this amount of radiation will only decrease by half compared to the original, but not completely disappear.
