Now and again a scientist comes along who was just as interesting away from science as they were as a a scientist.

Marie Curie surely fits this description.

She won her first Nobel prize along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel in 1903 and this prize was in Physics.  Her second Nobel prize she won on her own and this was in chemistry seven years later in 1911.

Her daughter and son-in-law also won a shared Nobel prize in 1935.

So the extended family won five Nobel prizes, which is a bit wow.

Probably the most important piece of work that Marie Curie did was to show that Uranium emitted radiation, not as some kind of chemical reaction, but as some kind of direct energy from the molecules themselves.  She did this for her PhD and this was the basis for her first Nobel prize.

Marie Curie was not only, arguably, the worlds greatest scientist of her time, but she also contributed to the development of her home country, Poland, setting up an oncology institute in Warsaw, which was directed by her sister and she also was a notable contributor to the war effort in the first world war.

Pierre, her husband died in a traffic accident in 1906 and she was apparently devastated after his death and she wrote that from that point on she became incurably lonely.

1911 was a particularly eventful year in Marie Curie’s life.  In 1910-1911 she had an affair with a the physicist Paul Langevin who was estranged from his wife, but at that time it caused somewhat of a scandal and was used against Marie Curie. The press printed speculation that she was Jewish - which was deliberately aimed at a public that tended toward xenophobia- and because she was older than Langevin, they called her a home-wrecker and more.  She won her second Nobel prize that year, she persuaded the French government to build the Marie Curie institute in Paris.

However, in that very year, when she won her second Nobel prize, she was not elected to the French Academy of Sciences.  She would have been the first woman if she was elected, but the academy maintained its prejudice against women and instead elected a scientist that was involved with the invention of the telegraph.  It would be another 50 years before the French academy elected a woman as a member.  Interestingly the woman they elected was a doctoral student of Marie Curie.

When Marie Curie worked on radiation, she had no idea of the ill-effects of this work.  She carried radioactive substances around with her, kept them in her desk drawer and never knew the danger.  She died of cancer and indeed today so much of her personal items are so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes.  Her cookbook is radioactive.

She is now interred in the Pantheon in Paris, along with her husband Pierre.  She is the first woman to have been interred in the Pantheon on her own merits.