The discovery of two new elements—polonium, named for her homeland, and radium with its strange powers—brought the Polish-born Marie Sklodowska Curie to the world’s attention in 1898. Both elements were “radioactive,” a term she coined to describe their unusual behavior.
As radioactivity reshaped physics and chemistry in the early 20th century, Mme. Curie met regularly with a coterie of scientists, including her friend Albert Einstein. For decades she stood out at international conferences as the only woman in the room. Meanwhile she made room in her laboratory between 1906 and 1933 for more than forty aspiring female scientists. During the First World War, she drove her personally outfitted mobile X-ray units to combat zones accompanied by her seventeen-year-old daughter, Irène. Together they trained some 150 French women as X-ray technicians. After Irène completed her university studies, she followed her mother into the lab and won her own Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935.