Maria Salomea Sklodowska was the daughter of a Physics and Mathematics teacher and a teacher woman, and her childhood was marked by the death of one of her sisters from typhus and the death of her mother from tuberculosis when she was only ten years old. She grew up in a Polish-occupied Russian Empire region, but her family never triggered from patriotism, so Russian supervisors gave her mother poorly paid jobs, so they had serious economic problems.

The hard situations at her home meant that she was not very well educated, so after her basic education she could not enter a higher education institution as a woman. This increased her desire to learn, and she and her sister entered a Polish underground college that accepted women. In 1891 she finally moved to France to study thanks to her savings and the help of her father.

In 1839 she received her degree in Physics from the University of Paris, being the number one in her promotion. A year later she met the one who became her husband in 1895 and father of her two daughters: Pierre Curie. She continued her education in Physics and obtained her doctorate, dedicating her dissertation to research on radioactive substances, with the help of her husband, but working in difficult and dangerous conditions.

In 1898 they announced the discovery of new elements: radium and polonium, the two being more radioactive than uranium, but not until four years later did they prove their existence. In 1903 her discovery was recognized, not only by her doctorate, but also by the Nobel Prize in Physics, together with her husband, for her research in radioactivity, making her the first woman in history on winning a Nobel Prize. However, she did not have the same recognition as her man, since he was made professor of the University of Paris and two years later he became a member of the French Academy. Unfortunately in 1902, a horse carriage runned over Pierre and died, so Marie held the chair of Physics of her husband at the University of Sorbonne, becoming the first female professor at that university.

She decided to continue the research herself and set up a new and better laboratory to work with. During the following years she combined her work at the University with the care of her daughters and her research on radio. She soon discovered that radiation therapy could be a cancer treatment, which made her research popular. These made her win a second Nobel Prize, this time for Chemistry, in 1911. Some people say she could have lost it for a "love scandal," which has nothing to do with science, and there were people who advised Maire to give up recognition, but there were others, such as Albert Einstein, who persuaded the scientist to accept him. She finally accepted it and went to the delivery ceremony in Stockholm, saying her private life did not influence her work.

Apart from her work as a scientist, she also played a significant role in World War II, as she secured several automobiles and portable X-ray machines and created "radiological ambulances" to save lives of many soldiers, so she was named director of the Red Cross Radiology Service. After the war she returned to her studies and was part of several scientific academies, such as the National Academy of Medicine of France in 1922, gaining numerous awards.

She died in 1934 due to the large amounts of radiation exposed to her by experiments.