Marie Sklodowska Curie was born in Poland shortly after the unsuccessful Polish revolt against Russia in 1863. Following high school, she worked diligently to help meet the educational expenses of her older brother and sister who had left for Paris. At the same time, she managed to save enough money for her own trip to Paris and entered the Sorbonne in 1891. Although she lived very frugally during this period (fainting once from hunger in the classroom), she graduated at the top of her class.
In 1895 she married the French physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906), who was already known for the discovery of piezoelectricity. (A piezoelectric crystal exhibits a potential difference under pressure.) Using piezoelectric materials to measure the activity of radioactive substances, she demonstrated the radioactive nature of the elements uranium and thorium. In 1898, she and her husband discovered a new radioactive element contained in uranium ore, which they called polonium, after her native land. By the end of 1898, the Curies succeeded in isolating trace amounts of an even more radioactive element, which they named radium. In an effort to produce weighable quantities of radium, they embarked on a painstaking effort of isolating radium from pitchblende, an ore rich in uranium. After four years of purifying and repurifying tons of ore, and using their own life savings to finance their work, the Curies succeeded in preparing about 0.1 g of radium. In 1903, they were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, which they shared with Becquerel, for their studies of radioactive substances.
After her husband's death in an accident in 1906, she took over his professorship at the Sorbonne. Unfortunately, she experienced prejudice in the scientific community because she was a woman. For example, after being nominated to the French Academy of Sciences, she was refused membership, losing by one vote.
In 1911, she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this one in chemistry, for the discovery of radium and polonium. She spent the last few decades of her life supervising the Paris Institute of Radium.