Marie Curie (Yellow)

Through her discovery of radium, Marie Curie paved the way for nuclear physics and cancer therapy.  She was a woman of science and courage, compassionate yet stubbornly determined.

Marie Curie was originally named Marya Sklodowska.  She was born in Warsaw, Poland on 7 November 1867.

In 1891, the shy Marya arrived in Paris. Ambitious and self-taught, she had but one obsession: to learn. She passed a physics degree with flying colours, and went on to sit a mathematics degree. It was then that a Polish friend introduced her to Pierre Curie, a young man and scientist who, in 1895, became her husband.

She had to fight the prejudices of her day: hatred of foreigners and sexism which, in 1911, prevented her from entering the Academy of Science. 

In the end she was honoured with a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for determining the atomic weight of radium. But her real joy was easing human suffering. The founding of the Radium Institute by the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute in 1914 would enable her to fulfil her humanitarian wish.