First and only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences

Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, becoming the first person ever to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. She remains the only person to hold that distinction. Her research on radioactivity, including the discovery of polonium and radium, laid groundwork still used in medicine and physics today.