Polish maiden name: Maria Sklodowska. Polish-French chemist who gave the name "radioactivity" to the emission of radiation from atoms. Working with her husband, Pierre, she showed thorium, as well as uranium to be radioactive, and demonstrated that the radioactivity of a substance was proportional to the quantity of radioactive material present. Noticing that the radioactivity in some samples was too high to explain by any concentration of uranium, she set out to isolate the source of the radioactivity.

In 1898, she discovered polonium in pitchblende. The radioactivity was not strong enough to explain the observations, however, so further investigations were carried out. Later that year, Marie discovered a trace amount of highly radioactive radium. During the course of four years, the Curies refined eight tons of raw ore to produce one gram of radium. Marie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel for the investigation of radioactivity. She also received the 1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her discovery of two new elements, which she had to accept alone because her husband had been killed in a traffic accident. This makes Madame Curie one of only four people to have received two Nobel Prizes: Bardeen, Curie, Pauling, and Sanger.

In later years, Marie and Pierre's daughter Iréne Joliot-Curie and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot-Curie won Nobel Prizes, as did her neighbor and close friend Perrin. As a gift for her scientific discoveries, Marie was presented with a pendant containing radium. Not surprisingly, Marie died of leukemia caused by overexposure to radioactivity.

Curie (Pierre), Joliot-Curie (Frederic), Joliot-Curie (Irene)