Marie Curie is still the only Nobel winner in two sciences

Marie Curie, born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw on 7 November 1867, is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences: physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win two.

She grew up in the part of partitioned Poland ruled by the Russian tsar, where Polish culture was suppressed. To get to university she made a pact with her sister Bronya: Maria worked as a governess to pay for Bronya’s medical studies in Paris, and Bronya later helped fund hers.

The road to the second prize

• 1891: Maria begins at the Sorbonne.
• 1903: she wins the physics prize, the first woman to win a Nobel.
• January 1911: she loses an election to the French Academy of Sciences to Édouard Branly by two votes, after right-wing papers spread rumours that she was Jewish and “not truly French”.
• Autumn 1911: the press hounds her over her relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin. Svante Arrhenius, of the Nobel committee, advises her to stay away until her name is cleared.
• 10 December 1911: she goes to Stockholm anyway and accepts the chemistry prize, for discovering radium and polonium and isolating radium. Then she collapses, with depression and kidney illness, and makes no laboratory notebook entry for nearly 14 months.
• 1934: she dies. A year later her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie shares the chemistry prize with her husband, Frédéric Joliot.

The 1911 prize came at the worst possible moment. As of 2026, only five people have won two Nobel Prizes: Curie, John Bardeen (Physics 1956 and 1972), Frederick Sanger (Chemistry 1958 and 1980), Linus Pauling (Chemistry 1954 and Peace 1962, the only person with two unshared prizes) and K. Barry Sharpless (Chemistry 2001 and 2022). Curie is the only one whose two prizes are in different sciences.