Marie Curie

Born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw in 1867, she left a partitioned Poland — where universities were closed to women — for Paris, studying physics while half-starving in a garret. With her husband Pierre she isolated polonium and radium from tons of raw ore, sharing the 1903 Nobel in Physics; after Pierre's death she won a second, in Chemistry, in 1911, alone. She built mobile X-ray units for the battlefields of the First World War, then ran the Radium Institute that trained a generation of scientists. The radiation she handled with bare hands for decades destroyed her health, and she died in 1934…