Maria Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw on 7 November 1867 and emigrated to Paris in 1891 to study at the Sorbonne, where she met physicist Pierre Curie in 1894 and married him in 1895. Working in a converted shed at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, the Curies extracted radioactive elements from pitchblende, the uranium-bearing ore left over from glassworks waste, by hand. The work required processing several tonnes of pitchblende to recover sub-gram quantities of pure radium chloride. They published their isolation of polonium (named for Marie's native Poland) in July 1898 and radium in December 1898.
In 1903 the Curies and Henri Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of natural radioactivity (a term Marie coined). Pierre Curie was killed in a Paris street accident in 1906; Marie continued the work alone, succeeding to his Sorbonne professorship - the first woman ever to hold a chair at that university. In 1911 she received a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for the isolation of pure metallic radium and the determination of its atomic weight. She remains the only person ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."- Marie Curie
The Curies' refusal to patent the radium-isolation process - on the principle that scientific knowledge should be freely available - meant that any industrial concern could legally produce radium and radium-based products. Within a decade of the 1898 isolation, radium was being marketed as a miracle medicine, a beauty product, an additive in toothpaste and chocolate, and most consequentially for watchmaking, a luminescent paint. William J. Hammer combined radium bromide with zinc sulfide in 1908 to produce the first self-luminous paint, marketed by US Radium Corporation as "Undark." Curie was not directly involved in any of these commercial applications.
Marie Curie founded the Institut du Radium (Curie Institute) in Paris in 1909 as a centre for radioactivity research and medical applications, particularly the use of radium for cancer therapy (then called "Curie therapy"; the modern term is brachytherapy). During the First World War she organised mobile X-ray units (the "petites Curies") for the French army, training around 150 women as radiographers and personally driving units to the front. By the time she died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia almost certainly caused by decades of unprotected radium exposure, the Institut du Radium had become one of the world's leading centres for radiation medicine.
Curie's scientific notebooks from the 1890s and 1900s remain so radioactive that they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and require protective equipment to consult. Her lab clothing, papers, and even cookbooks all register on Geiger counters; her body and Pierre's, when reinterred at the Panthéon in 1995, were placed in lead-lined coffins as a precaution. Curie's ambivalent legacy in watchmaking, the gift of self-luminous dials and the curse of the Radium Girls who painted them, runs in parallel: modern Super-LumiNova exists in direct response to the dangers her discovery introduced.
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