11 Radiant Facts About Marie Curie

Born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Poland on November 7, 1867, Marie Curie grew up to become one of the most noteworthy scientists of all time. Her long list of accolades is proof of her far-reaching influence, but not every stride she made in the fields of chemistry, physics, and medicine was recognized with an award. Here are some facts you might not know about the iconic researcher.

1. Marie Curie’s parents were teachers.

Maria Skłodowska was the fifth and youngest child of two Polish educators. Her parents placed a high value on learning and insisted that all their children—including their daughters—receive a quality education at home and at school. Maria received extra science training from her father, and when she graduated from high school at age 15, she was first in her class.

2. She had to seek out alternative education for women.

After collecting her high school diploma, Maria had hoped to study at the University of Warsaw with her sister, Bronia. Because the school didn't accept women, the siblings instead enrolled at the Flying University, a Polish college that welcomed female students. It was still illegal for women to receive higher education at the time, so the institution was constantly changing locations to avoid detection from authorities. In 1891, Maria moved to Paris to live with her sister, where she enrolled at the Sorbonne to continue her education.

3. Marie Curie is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two separate sciences.

In 1903, Marie Curie made history when she won the Nobel Prize in physics with her husband, Pierre, and with physicist Henri Becquerel for their work on radioactivity, making her the first woman to receive the honor. The second Nobel Prize she took home in 1911 was even more historic: With that win in the chemistry category, she became the first person to win the award twice. And she remains the only person to ever receive Nobel Prizes for two different sciences.

4. Curie added two elements to the Periodic Table.

The second Nobel Prize Marie Curie received recognized her discovery and research of two elements: radium and polonium. The former element was named for the Latin word for ray and the latter was a nod to her home country, Poland.

5. Nobel Prize-winning ran in her family.

When Marie and Pierre won their Nobel Prize in 1903, their daughter Irène was only 6 years old. She would grow up to follow in her parents’ footsteps by jointly winning the Nobel Prize for chemistry with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, in 1935. They were recognized for their discovery of “artificial” radioactivity, a breakthrough made possible by Irène’s parents years earlier. Marie and Pierre’s other son-in-law, Henry Labouisse, who married their younger daughter, Ève Curie, accepted a Nobel Prize for Peace on behalf of UNICEF, of which he was the executive director, in 1965. This brought the family’s total up to five. (Ève Curie Labouisse was an accomplished journalist, newspaper publisher, French Resistance advocate during World War II, and her mother's biographer.)

6. Curie did her most important work in a shed.

The research that won Marie Curie her first Nobel Prize required hours of physical labor. In order to prove they had discovered new elements, she and her husband had to produce numerous examples of them by breaking down ore into its chemical components. Their regular labs weren’t big enough to accommodate the process, so they moved their work into an old shed behind the school where Pierre worked. According to Curie, the space was a hothouse in the summer and drafty in the winter, with a glass roof that didn’t fully protect them from the rain. After the famed German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald visited the Curies’ shed to see the place where radium was discovered, he described it as being “a cross between a stable and a potato shed, and if I had not seen the worktable and items of chemical apparatus, I would have thought that I been played a practical joke.”

7. Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive.

When Marie Curie was performing her most important research on radiation in the early 20th century, she had no idea of the effects it would have on her health. It wasn't unusual for her to walk around her lab with bottles of polonium and radium in her pockets. She even described storing the radioactive material out in the open in her autobiography. “One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles of capsules containing our products […] The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.”

It’s no surprise then that Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia, likely caused by prolonged exposure to radiation, in 1934. Even her notebooks are still radioactive a century later. Today, they’re stored in lead-lined boxes, and will likely remain radioactive for another 1500 years.

8. Marie and Pierre once investigated a psychic medium.

Two years after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Marie and Pierre Curie took part in investigations of Eusapia Palladino, an Italian medium who claimed she could channel the dead, and attended a number of seances. Pierre apparently thought some of the feats Palladino performed—which included levitating objects and tables—were the real deal. (Marie didn’t seem to be quite as convinced.)

9. Curie offered to donate her medals to the war effort.

Curie had been a double Nobel laureate for only a few years when she considered parting ways with her medals. At the start of World War I, France put out a call for gold to fund the war effort, so Curie offered to have her two medals melted down. When bank officials refused to accept them, she settled for donating her prize money to purchase war bonds.

10. Marie Curie developed a portable X-ray to treat soldiers.

Marie’s desire to help her adopted country fight the new war didn’t end with donating her prizes. After making the donation, she developed an interest in X-rays—not a far jump from her previous work with radium—and it didn’t take her long to realize that the emerging technology could be used to aid soldiers on the battlefield.

Curie convinced the French government to name her director of the Red Cross Radiology Service and persuaded her wealthy friends to fund her idea for a mobile X-ray machine. She learned to drive and operate the vehicle herself and treated wounded soldiers at the Battle of the Marne, ignoring protests from skeptical military doctors. Her invention was proven effective at saving lives, and ultimately 20 “petite Curies,” as the X-ray machines were called, were built for the war.

11. She founded centers for medical research.

Following World War I, Marie Curie embarked on a different fundraising mission, this time with the goal of supporting her research centers in Paris and Warsaw. Curie’s radium institutes were the site of important work, like the discovery of a new element, francium, by Marguerite Perey, and the development of artificial radioactivity by Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie. The centers, now known as Institut Curie, are still used as spaces for vital cancer treatment research today.

A version of this story ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2023.