1-157-728 - Oxford Science Archive/Heritage Images

Marie Curie, Polish-born French physicist, driving a Renault car converted into a radiological unit, 1914. Marie Curie (1867-1934) drove this vehicle from hospital to hospital, using it to treat wounded soldiers after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. Marie and her husband Pierre pioneered research into radioactivity, discovering the elements radium and polonium. They shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Henri Becquerel in 1903, and Marie won a second Nobel Prize, for Chemistry, in 1911.