Marie Curie, the only person to win Nobels in two sciences, was born
On this day · 7 November 1867
Born in Warsaw in 1867, she would become the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes—and the only one to win them in two sciences.
Maria Sklodowska, later known as Marie Curie, was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. Barred from higher education at home, she studied in Paris, where her work on radioactivity—a word she coined—reshaped physics and chemistry.
In 1903 she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, becoming the first woman to win a Nobel. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for isolating radium and polonium, the latter named for her homeland.
She remains the only person honored in two distinct scientific fields.
Curie never patented her methods, sharing them freely with researchers worldwide. The radiation she handled daily eventually killed her in 1934, but her notebooks are still so radioactive they are stored in lead-lined boxes.
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