By Lauren Redniss
This is a fantastic and artfully done book about the husband and wife team of Marie and Pierre Curie. Together, they discovered radium and polonium. After four years of steady labor, four hundred tons of water, and forty tons of corrosive chemicals, on March 28, 1902, they managed to extract one tenth of a gram of radium.
Marie achieved many other notable firsts:
- First female to earn a PhD in France
- First female to win a Nobel prize. (She was born the year Alfred Nobel discovered dynamite)
- After Pierre's death, the Sorbonne offered her his professorship - first time in its 650 year history a woman was professor
- First person to win two Nobel prizes first in Physics, second in Chemistry. Her daughter, Irene and her husband would win another Prize for their discovery of artificial radiation.
