Who was Marie Curie and what is she famous for?

Marie Curie is a Polish-born physicist and chemist who is remembered for being the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1903 for her research into radioactivity. Curie later went on to win a second Nobel Prize, for chemistry, in 1911. She is still the only person to have won two Nobels in two different sciences.

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Born in Warsaw, Curie studied physics at university in Paris where she met her future research collaborator and husband, Pierre. Together they identified two new elements: radium and polonium, named after her native Poland. After he died, she raised a small fortune in the US and Europe to fund laboratories and to develop cancer treatments.

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