In 1891, Manya Skłodowska moved from Warsaw to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.

In just three years, she earned two degrees, in physics and mathematics—then took a job with a promising young scientist.

They fell in love and were married. She changed her Polish first name to the French version: Marie. And took his last name: Curie.

Marie and Pierre Curie became the first to understand and measure radioactivity, then the first to identify the element radium.

When he was killed in an accident, she was devasted, but pushed on. She established the world’s first radiation lab at the Sorbonne, then another to research and treat cancer. And she trained a new partner: her 17-year-old daughter Irène.

During World War I, mother and daughter developed portable X-ray machines to locate shrapnel and fractures in injured soldiers, operated them on the battlefield, and trained medics to use them.

Marie never patented her work or sought to profit from it. She just wanted to do the science and share it with the world. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t rewarded.

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, for physics, at just 36.

Then the first person to win a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry.

That made her the only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

If that’s not enough, her daughter eventually won one, too.

Marie and Irène Curie: trailblazing women on the forefront of science.