My wartime engineering rested on one rule: wounded soldiers are best served when operated on as soon as possible, so X-ray imaging must travel to the front instead of waiting behind it.
In 1900 I became the first woman faculty member at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles, and in June 1903 I earned my doctorate from the University of Paris under Gabriel Lippmann.
I wrote up my knowledge for others: Radiology in War (1919) on the wartime service, a biography Pierre Curie (1923), and Radioactivity, the book I worked on in my last year.
In 1890–1891 I began practical scientific training in a Warsaw chemistry laboratory run by Józef Boguski, once Mendeleyev's assistant, while studying at the Flying University and teaching myself.
I insisted that monetary gifts and awards go to the scientific institutions I worked with rather than to me, returned my scholarship once I earned my keep, and shared my first Nobel money with students and associates.
I deliberately did not patent the radium-isolation process, so the scientific community could research unhindered, even as a profitable radium industry grew from my work.
I shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone, becoming the first person to win or share two Nobel Prizes.
In 1915 I produced hollow needles filled with 'radium emanation', the radioactive gas later identified as radon, to sterilise infected tissue, using radium from my own one-gram supply.
I learned radiology, anatomy and automotive mechanics quickly, procured X-ray equipment, vehicles and generators, assembled mobile units, and trained women as aides to run them.
During World War I, I developed mobile radiography units, the 'Little Curies', directed the Red Cross Radiology Service, and installed 20 mobile vehicles and 200 field units; over a million soldiers were treated with my X-ray units.
