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Radiance of Maria Skłodowska-Curie.



Photo: 1911 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Nobel Prize Diploma. Courtesy Wikipedia. Public Domain




"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."

We are honoring National Women Physician Day, February 3, with a post about Maria Sklodowska-Curie. She was not a physician, yet the magnitude of her scientific discoveries changed the science and practice of medicine forever.


"I was born in Poland. I married Pierre Curie, and I have two daughters. I have done my work in France."

Maria Skłodowska-Curie (1867-1934) had many firsts: the first woman to win the Nobel Prize (1903), the first and only woman who won the Nobel Prize twice (1903, 1911), the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two disciplines, the only person to win the prize in multiple disciplines, the first woman to receive a doctorate in France, the first woman who took place as Professor of General Physics in the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne, Paris, and the first woman to be interred in the Pantheon, Paris, on her merit. She was also a wife of a Nobel Prize Winner- Pierre Curie, and a mother of Nobel Prize winner- Irene Joliot-Curie, who studied radioactivity, transmutation, and nuclear physics. Sklodowska-Curie coined the term radioactivity.