Marie Skłodowska-Curie

1867 – 1934 · Poland · Physics, Chemistry, Medicine

Nobel Prize in Physics 1903; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1911

The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Summary^1,3,4

Barred from Polish universities as a woman, Curie studied in Paris, coined the term radioactivity, isolated polonium and radium by processing tonnes of pitchblende by hand, and built mobile X-ray units that served an estimated one million wounded soldiers in the First World War. The radiation that made her famous killed her.

Achievements^1,3,5

Discovered the elements polonium and radium and named the phenomenon of radioactivity
First woman to win a Nobel Prize, first person to win two, and still the only person to win in two sciences
First woman to hold a professorship at the University of Paris
Designed and drove the 'petites Curies', mobile radiography units, at the WWI front

Principal works^2,4

Recherches sur les substances radioactivesTraité de radioactivitéRadioactivity (posthumous)

How the work shapes the world today⁵

Radiotherapy treats roughly half of all cancer patients; nuclear medicine imaging, radiocarbon dating, smoke detectors and nuclear power all rest on radioactivity as she defined it. The curie is a unit of radioactivity and curium an element. She is the standing global symbol for women in science, invoked in every STEM-equity programme, and her notebooks are still too radioactive to handle without protection.

Posterity and the family line^2,5

With Pierre Curie she had two daughters. The family holds five Nobel Prizes across three generations — the most decorated scientific family in history.

6 people · 3 generations · 5 links with primary documentation

Irène Joliot-Curie
1897 – 1956
Daughter
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1935 with her husband Frédéric for the synthesis of artificial radioactive elements. Died of leukaemia, like her mother, from a working life spent with radium and polonium.
Documented
Ève Curie
1904 – 2007
Daughter
Writer and war correspondent; her 1937 biography Madame Curie shaped the world's image of her mother. Married Henry Richardson Labouisse, who accepted the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize for UNICEF — a fifth Nobel in the family.
Documented

via Irène Joliot-Curie
Hélène Langevin-Joliot
b. 1927
Granddaughter
Nuclear physicist at the CNRS and the Institut de Physique Nucléaire at Orsay; married Michel Langevin, grandson of Paul Langevin, joining the two scientific houses. Still lecturing on science and public trust into her nineties.
Documented
via Irène Joliot-Curie
Pierre Joliot
b. 1932
Grandson
Biologist at the Collège de France; discovered the four-step cycle of oxygen release in photosynthesis, work now central to models of plant productivity and climate.
Documented
via Ève Curie
Anne Peretz
b. 1937
Step-granddaughter
Labouisse's daughter, raised in Ève's household; founder of the Family Center in Somerville, Massachusetts. Ève had no biological children, so the line here is one of adoption and household rather than blood.
Attested

Every link carries its own evidence. Documented means a register, will, archive or prize record names the relationship; attested rests on scholarly reference; contested is disputed between sources; and where the record runs out it is marked rather than filled in.

Talks and interviews

Continuity of ideas

Who shaped Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and who they shaped

Inherited from1

Alfred Nobel
1833 – 1896 · Chemistry, Engineering
Nobel's endowment created the prize system that funded and certified her radium work.

Passed the work to2

Ernest Rutherford
1871 – 1937 · Physics, Chemistry
Curie's radium supplied the alpha sources for Rutherford's scattering experiments.
Lise Meitner
1878 – 1968 · Physics, Chemistry
Radiochemistry as Curie practised it — isolate, measure, name — is Meitner's method.

Sources and references

Numbered markers in the text above point to the entries below. Each links to a primary document, archival collection or scholarly reference where the claim about Marie Skłodowska-Curie can be checked.