Marie Curie pictured at work in her laboratory in Paris, in 1912
Universal History Archive/Getty Images
The Elements of Marie Curie
Dava Sobel (Fourth Estate, UK; Grove Atlantic, US)
ON 7 November 1867, Marya Salomea Sklodowska was born in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire. She was the youngest of five children, and became known as “Manya” by her family.
She was a voraciously curious child who learned to read at the age of 4 and developed a fascination with science, thanks in large part to her father, a teacher of physics and mathematics. Even so, no one could…
