On October 21, 1898, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie published the announcement of polonium in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences — the discovery that would eventually form part of the Nobel Prize awarded four years later. They had been working in a converted shed at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles. The shed had a leaky roof.

Curie was born Maria Skłodowska in 1867 in Warsaw, under Russian occupation, where higher education for women was illegal. She participated in the underground "Floating University" — clandestine educational sessions that moved locations to avoid police — and eventually emigrated to Paris, where she could study legally. She enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1891 and graduated first in her physics degree in 1893, and second in her mathematics degree in 1894.

She met Pierre Curie in 1894 and they married in 1895. The research that produced their two element discoveries — polonium in July 1898, radium in December 1898 — was conducted in appalling conditions: unheated shed, no ventilation for the radioactive materials they were handling, funding barely sufficient for equipment. Neither understood the health consequences of radiation exposure.

The Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 was awarded to Henri Becquerel and Pierre and Marie Curie. The French Academy of Sciences, which had nominated Becquerel and Pierre Curie, had initially proposed to leave Marie out. Pierre refused to accept unless she was included.

She won a second Nobel Prize — in Chemistry, in 1911 — becoming the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. The French Academy of Sciences refused to admit her as a member the same year by one vote.