1In 1927, 29 of the top physicists gathered at the prestigious Solvay Conference in Brussels.
2The only woman in attendance was Marie Curie.
3She had a lot of firsts.
4She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
5The first person to win the Nobel Prize twice.
6And the first person to win in two different fields.
7Curie was best known for her work in radioactivity which would save a million lives during the first world war.
8But would ultimately take her own.
9Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea Sklodowska in Warsaw, Poland
10then under the control of the Russian Empire on November 7, 1867.
11She was the youngest child of teachers.
12Her mother, Bronislawa Sklodowska, was the headteacher of a prestigious boarding school for girls.
13Her father, Wladyslaw Sklodowski, taught physics and math and was proud of his Polish heritage.
14As a result of his patriotism, his Russian supervisors forced him into lower-paying positions.
15He also lost his savings through a bad investment.
16To support their five children, they had to take in student boarders.
17This would be fatal.
18Maria's eldest sibling, her sister Zofia, caught typhus from one of the lodgers and died.
19A few years later, when Maria was ten, her mother died of tuberculosis.
20The tragedies caused Maria to give up Catholicism - the faith of her mom - and become agnostic.
21Her father wouldn't forgive himself for losing his family's savings.
22However, his children would remember him as the man who nurtured them emotionally and intellectually.
23Maria finished high school at the top of her class but wasn't allowed to attend university because she was a woman.
24The Russian empire banned women from getting a university education.
25So she and her sister Bronislawa (or Bronya for short) enrolled in the secretive Flying University - or Floating University - in Warsaw -
26named after the ever-changing location of classes to avoid the watchful eye of Czarist authorities.
27Her sister then left for medical school in Paris.
28Maria hoped to eventually join her.
29The two made a pact: Maria would support her sister's studies in Paris, and Bronya would return the favor in the future.
30So, from the age of 17, Maria worked as a governess, tutor, and also studied in her spare time.
31While working for relatives, the Zorawskis, she fell in love with their son, Kazimierz, who would become a mathematician.
32But the Zorawskis didn't approve of her because she didn't have a penny to her name.
33It was said that as an old man, Kazimierz would sit contemplatively before the statue of her in front of the research institute she went on to found.
34In 1891, when Maria was 24, she finally had the means to join her sister in Paris, and now used the name Marie.
35She enrolled at the University of Paris - known as the Sorbonne - where she studied physics and mathematics.
36At first, she lived in the home of her sister who was now married
37but later opted to rent a little attic closer to the university.
38She often stayed at the heated library until closing rather than spend the evening in her unheated room.
39Her earlier education had been insufficient so there was a lot of catching up to do.
40She sometimes worked so hard she forgot to eat and would pass out.
41Despite the difficulties, Marie marveled at her freedom, writing:
42"It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty."
43She earned a degree in physics, and then another in mathematics.
44She planned on returning to Poland but then Pierre Curie came into her life.
45He was eight years older, a well-known physicist, and an outsider who was educated by his father in his teens.
46They were introduced by a mutual friend who knew Marie needed lab space for her research
47and Pierre headed a laboratory at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry where engineers were trained.
48Marie would say of Pierre:
49"He had dedicated his life to his dream of science: he felt the need of a companion who could live his dream with him."
50And he hoped that companion would be her.
51But Marie turned down his marriage proposal since her plan was to return to her native country.
52However, she learned that it wouldn't be possible to start a career in Poland.
53When she went back to visit her family during summer break in 1894,
54Krakow University denied her a job as a professor because she was a woman.
55Pierre convinced her to come back to Paris to pursue a PhD.
56She insisted that he, too, get his doctorate, which he did, pioneering research on magnetism.
57They married in 1895 at the town hall in Sceaux in the suburbs of Paris.
58Partners in life and in science.
59Marie wore a dark blue outfit on her wedding day that would become her trademark in the laboratory.
60They bought bicycles with the money they received as a wedding gift -
61their way of relaxing in a life otherwise filled with research.
62Marie Curie would earn her Doctor of Science degree from the Sorbonne in 1903.
63She did her thesis on radiation, which was recently discovered in uranium by Henri Becquerel.
64Curie was intrigued by Becquerel's discovery and investigated further.
65She used an electrometer invented by her husband and his brother to measure radioactivity in many substances and materials.
66She realized through her experiments that radiation was a property of the element of uranium.
67Yet when she observed the mineral pitchblende which primarily contains uranium -
68she noticed it was far more radioactive than uranium could explain.
69How could this be?
70It would only be possible if there were something else in the pitchblende.
71Pierre was so intrigued that he dropped his own work to join her in her search.
72They ground up tons of pitchblende and discovered an element that was 400 times more radioactive than uranium:
73Polonium. Named after her country of birth.
74And then, they discovered another element that gave off 900 times more radiation than polonium: radium.
75The unglamorous work of extracting and isolating the elements took place in a leaky and drafty shack near Pierre's work
76as they didn't have a dedicated lab space.
77Their efforts paid off.
78The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 went to Marie, Pierre, and Becquerel for their research in radiation.
79French academics originally proposed that only Pierre and Becquerel receive the prize, leaving Marie out.
80A sign of the times.
81However, a sympathetic member of the nominating committee, Swedish mathematician Gosta Mittage-Leffler alerted Pierre to the situation.
82He insisted that his wife share the honor.
83Marie Curie became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
84She and her husband were too busy with their research to accept the award in person in Stockholm.
85Pierre was also sick, suffering from pain and fatigue.
86They had no idea at the time that radiation could be detrimental to their health.
87It is said that Marie would carry tubes of radium in her pockets.
88She was fascinated by what she described as "faint fairy lights".
89Little did she know this was slowly killing her.
90The glowing green radium captivated the public.
91It would be a key element in early cancer treatment.
92And would also find its way into everyday products: toothpaste with a promise of benefitting teeth
93and facial creams in the belief that it would firm muscles and smooth out wrinkles.
94The element was so popular that in the 1920s, a single gram of radium cost more than $100,000 -
95well over a million today!
96The Curies could have tried to patent radium and cash in big time, but they didn't.
97Marie declared: "Radium is a chemical element, a property of all humans."
98After their ground-breaking work, it was Pierre who would be promoted as head of the physics department at the Sorbonne.
99Yet he still didn't have a proper lab.
100Pierre complained and the university relented,
101however, he would never get his dream of working in a new laboratory
102because tragedy struck less than two years after the birth of their second daughter.
103On a rainy day in April 1906,
104Pierre was walking across the Rue Dauphine when he was run over by a horse and carriage.
105He died instantly.
106Pierre's father implied that his son's preoccupation with his own thoughts contributed to his death.
107Marie was offered his academic post at the Sorbonne instead of accepting a widow's pension.
108She became the first female professor in France.
109Hundreds of people lined up outside the university hoping to attend her first lecture.
110The period following her husband's death would be the most difficult of her life.
111In 1911, the French Academy of Sciences, the gathering place for prominent scientists, rejected her for membership
112when she put herself forward for a vacant seat.
113They passed her over for physicist and inventor Edouard Branly.
114Many suspected it was because she was an immigrant and a woman.
115Despite getting snubbed by the Academy, she went on to win something even greater later that year:
116A second Nobel Prize - this time in chemistry,
117for the discovery of polonium and radium, the isolation of radium,
118and the study of the nature of that remarkable element.
119But the buzz around her wasn't great.
120The French press was all over her affair with her husband's former student,
121physician Paul Langevin, who was married but estranged from his wife.
122She was labeled as a homewrecker and even warned that it might be best if she didn't pick up the Prize in person.
123Curie sank into a deep depression.
124Only to be slowly pulled out with the support of a fellow scientist.
125Albert Einstein struck up a friendship with Curie at the first Solvay conference in 1911.
126He wrote her a letter of encouragement during this dark period.
127"I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty..."
128He then told her to pay no mind to the stories in the press: "..simply don't read that hogwash..."
129Curie went to Stockholm to accept her second Nobel Prize and the headlines about the affair eventually blew over.
130She would slowly recover and was in the middle of setting up a giant laboratory at her newly created Radium Institute when war broke out.
131As German troops headed toward Paris,
132she took her stash of precious radium to a bank vault in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, the new capital.
133She also tried to sell her two gold Nobel prize medals to help the war effort
134but the national bank refused to accept them.
135She would buy war bonds using her prize money but this self-sacrifice wasn't enough for her.
136She was determined to use her research to save the lives of French soldiers.
137She had studied the work of German scientist Wilhelm Roentgen who had discovered x-rays.
138Curie then brought x-ray machines to the battlefield
139by inventing mobile units called "little curies" to help surgeons locate and remove shrapnel and bullets from wounded soldiers.
140She and her daughter Irene trained 150 women to drive these little cars and drove one herself, despite the danger.
141Curie also oversaw 200 radiological rooms in field hospitals.
142It's estimated that by the end of the war, her efforts saved the lives of a million men
143but may have cost her her own.
144Curie knew that over-exposure to x-rays would pose risks to her health.
145But there wasn't any time to improve on safety practices.
146Years later, she would die of aplastic anaemia -
147a blood disease likely due to exposure to large amounts of radiation over her lifetime.
148Despite her humanitarian efforts, the French government never gave her any official recognition
149whereas she was gaining increasing fame abroad.
150In 1921, U.S. President Warren Harding invited her to the White House and gave her a gift of a gram of radium to aid in her research.
151The French government was apparently embarrassed by the fact that they gave her no distinctions
152so, before that trip to DC, they offered her the country's most distinguished honor, the Legion d'Honneur - the Legion of Honor.
153She declined.
154During her later years, she headed the Radium Institute - later the Curie Institute in Paris.
155And opened another in Warsaw, where her sister Bronya became the director.
156Both remain major research institutions to this day.
157She was already in ill health by then.
158On July 4, 1934, Curie died at the age of 66 at a sanatorium in the town of Passy in eastern France.
159She didn't live to see her daughter Irene win her own Nobel Prize in Chemistry a year later for the artificial creation of new radioactive elements,
160sharing it with her husband, physicist Frederic Joliot.
161Curie was buried at a cemetery in Sceaux, the suburbs of Paris where she married, and where her husband lay.
162In 1995, both were moved to the Pantheon in Paris, the resting place for many distinguished French citizens
163like Victor Hugo, Rousseau, and Voltaire.
164Curie was the first woman to be honored in the Pantheon on her own merits.
165Her remains remained radioactive, so they were placed in a coffin lined with nearly an inch of lead.
166Even her papers are still radioactive today.
167Anyone who wants to examine them must wear protective gear and sign a waiver.
168Curie's tireless work was surpassed only by her fight to overcome the barriers in her way
169to become one of the greatest scientists of all time.
170It wasn't only her work that was impressive but also her work ethic.