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The Polish physicist and chemist Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, and the first person to be awarded twice in two different fields. Her discoveries in the field of radioactivity - adding polonium and radium to the table of elements - changed the course of scientific history and led to huge advances in the treatment of cancer.

This year marks 150 years after her birth to a poor family in occupied Poland. Quentin Cooper traces Marie Curie's extraordinary life story with Patricia Fara, president of the British Society for the History of Science; Maciej Dunajski, mathematician and theoretical physicist at Cambridge University; and Susan Quinn, author of Marie Curie: A Life.

Photo: Marie Curie (Hulton Archive/ Getty Images).