Marie Curie is remembered for her discovery of radium and polonium, and her huge contribution to finding treatments for cancer.
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields.
She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. In 1920 she founded the Curie Institute in Paris, and in 1932 the Curie Institute in Warsaw; both remain major centres of medical research. During World War I she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals.
Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, France, of aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during World War I.
