Marie Sklodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She married Pierre Curie, and together they took up the study of radioactivity. Their early work was done under hard conditions. The lab setup was poor, and both had to do a lot of teaching just to make a living. Still, they pressed on and isolated two new elements, polonium, named for her home country, and radium. In 1903 they shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Then in 1906, Pierre was killed. Marie took his place as professor at the Sorbonne, the first woman ever to hold that post. During World War I she personally worked to use radium to ease suffering. Grief didn’t stop her. She kept doing the work God put in front of her.
