Marie Curie, or rather Marya Sklodowska, was born in Warsaw on November 7, 1867. Her parents were teachers.

Marya was a brilliant student who dreamed of a scientific career, which was unheard of for a woman in those days. Marya had to work as a tutor to earn enough money to travel to Paris to study.

Marya went to university and gained degrees in Physics and Mathematics. At this time, this was very unusual. Most universities refused to admit women. In those that did, few women studied science degrees.

Marie struggled on with her work. She brought up and educated her two children and took over her husband's job as professor at the Sorbonne (the University of Paris). She had to fight a great deal of discrimination.

In 1912, she was awarded with a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for determining the atomic weight of radium.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Marie felt that mobile X ray units would help the wounded. She created X ray vans and trained the staff to run them. The photo on the right shows Marie with one of these trucks.

After the war, Marie turned her skills to helping cancer patients. She collected funds to finance this.

She died of leukaemia in 1934 after having been exposed to very high levels of radiation.

Radioactivity is the starting point for cancer treatment, for the dating techniques used on ancient objects, rocks and the universe, and for molecular biology and modern genetics. It is also the source of nuclear energy and the atomic bomb.

The Curie Institute in Paris, which was founded originally as Marie and Pierre's laboratory, continues her work in the fight against cancer.