Marie Curie is both the first but also the only woman to have received two Nobel Prizes. She is also the only recipient to date, men and women combined, to have received distinctions in two scientific disciplines, physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.
Maria Sklodowska, born in Poland in 1867 to a modest family, returned, after studying at the Sorbonne, to the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris. Her first Nobel Prize, in 1903, she owed it to the discovery of the natural radioactivity emitted by polonium (so named after her native land).
In 1911 Sweden rewarded her once again for having isolated radium and demonstrated that it was indeed a metal.
Discoveries that she implemented as early as 1911 by working at the Radium Institute, dedicated to the fight against cancer through radiotherapy. During the First World War, she participated in the creation of “radiological ambulances” to treat the “hairy”.
She is also responsible for 150 radiology positions in military hospitals. Marie Curie, who now rests in the Pantheon, is finally indirectly killed by the subject of her research, at a time when the harmfulness of radiation was unknown. She died in 1934 of leukemia at the age of 66.
