There was the prevailing attitude toward the Warsaw-born Curie among the French, who suspected her of being Jewish. There was the death of Pierre in 1906 after his skull was crushed under the wheel of a horse-drawn buggy, leaving Marie widowed with two young daughters. There was her profession’s refusal to acknowledge women’s contributions to scientific research, for starters, and the prevalence of professional spaces in which, as a woman, Curie could not even present her own work. This is but a snapshot of the many hurdles, scientific and societal, Marie Curie faced in her time. Pierre, meanwhile, was already so sick by 1903 that it would take another two years for the couple to travel to Stockholm to collect their prize. Prolonged exposure to radiation over the course of Marie’s career would eventually result in her death from aplastic anemia, a disease that manifests as an insufficient production of blood cells by the body. Through illness and tragedy, she persisted. It’s a reference, in part, to the fact that Curie-the first woman to win the Nobel prize (despite a nomination that originally named only her husband, Pierre Curie) and the only woman to win it twice-was slowly being killed by her discoveries. Of the groundbreaking scientist Marie Curie, the late poet Adrienne Rich once memorably wrote: “She died a famous woman denying / her wounds / denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

Obsessive genius marie curie