Marie Curie, a Polish-born physicist and chemist, spent her adult life studying and working in France. The focus of her work was the study of radioactivity, a phenomenon discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896. Married to the physicist Pierre Curie and working in his laboratory, she had demonstrated by the end of 1898 the existence of three new and radioactive elements-uranium, radium, and polonium-as well as some characteristics of their radioactivity. In 1903 she received the Nobel Prize in physics jointly with her husband and Becquerel for the pioneering work on radioactivity. In 1911 she was awarded a second Nobel Prize, in chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. Despite these and many other honors, as a foreign-born woman she had to contend throughout her life with the refusal of the French academic community to recognize her scientific eminence.
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