1-157-719 - Oxford Science Archive/Heritage Images

Marie Curie, Polish-born French physicist. Marie Curie (1867-1934) with her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) and members of the Institute of Radium, Paris. On the right is their co-worker Andre Debierne, who discovered the element actinium in 1909. Marie and her husband Pierre Curie continued the work on radioactivity started by Henri Becquerel. In 1898, they discovered two new elements, polonium and radium. Marie did most of the work of producing these elements, and to this day her notebooks are still too radioactive to use. She went on to become the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in France, and continued her work after Pierre's death in 1906. In 1903 the Curies shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Becquerel. Marie won a second Nobel Prize, for chemistry, in 1911. Irene followed her parents into science, winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935 for her work on the synthesis of new radioactive elements.