Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish-born, French-adopted physicist and chemist who discovered new elements, coined the word "radioactivity," and became the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes — in two different sciences. She did it while facing every barrier a woman of her time could face, and quietly refused to let any of them stop her.
Working with her husband Pierre, Marie showed that certain elements pour out energy all by
themselves — the process of
Marie kept glowing test tubes of radium in her desk drawer and marvelled at their eerie light, not yet knowing how dangerous it was. Her lab notebooks are still so radioactive that they're kept in lead-lined boxes, and anyone wanting to read them must sign a waiver. During the First World War she fitted cars with X-ray machines — nicknamed "little Curies" — and drove to the front herself to help wounded soldiers. When she died, she gave nearly everything away and patented nothing, believing science belonged to everyone.