Family That Won Five Nobels

Stockholm, December 1903. The hall is full of Sweden’s finest scientists, and all eyes are on a quiet 36-year-old woman who was born in Warsaw, Poland. No woman in history has ever stood on this stage to receive a Nobel Prize. Tonight, Marie Curie becomes the first.

What nobody in that hall can know is that this is only the beginning. The woman receiving the prize will win a second one. Her husband, standing beside her, is part of the same prize. One day their daughter will win one too, and so will the man their daughter marries. Prize by prize, branch by branch, one family tree will collect five Nobel Prizes — a record no family has ever beaten.

Walk down that tree with me, decade by decade.

1903: How Did Marie Curie Win Her First Nobel Prize?

Marie Skłodowska left Poland for Paris in 1891, because women in her home country were not allowed to study at university. In Paris she ranked first in her science degree, and in 1894 she met a French physicist named Pierre Curie. They married on 26 July 1895, in a small, simple ceremony, and went back to work almost at once.

Their subject was a strange new puzzle: rays given off by certain rocks and metals, a mystery Henri Becquerel had stumbled upon. Marie gave the phenomenon its famous name — radioactivity. Working in a leaky wooden shed that barely kept the rain out, the Curies examined a dark mineral ore called pitchblende and, in 1898, announced two completely new elements hiding inside it. One they named polonium, after Marie’s beloved Poland. The other was radium.

In December 1903, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three people together: Henri Becquerel, Pierre Curie, and Marie Curie, for their work on radiation. Marie was the first woman ever to receive a Nobel Prize. Half the prize honoured Becquerel’s discovery; the other half honoured the couple’s joint research.

April 1906: What Happened to Pierre Curie?

Success did not protect the family from sorrow. On 19 April 1906, Pierre Curie crossed the Rue Dauphine in Paris after a meeting, stepped in front of a horse-drawn carriage, and was killed instantly. He was only 46 years old.

Marie was left alone with two little daughters: Irène, aged eight, and baby Ève, who was one. Grief could have ended the family’s story right there. Instead, Marie accepted Pierre’s teaching post at the Sorbonne in Paris — becoming the first woman professor at the university — and, in a moment students never forgot, she began her first lecture by continuing the course from the very sentence where Pierre had stopped.

1911: How Did Marie Curie Win a Second Nobel Prize?

Alone now, Marie pushed the work further. She managed to isolate pure radium metal and studied the element and its compounds in depth. In 1911, Stockholm called again. This time the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was hers alone, for the discovery of radium and polonium and the isolation of radium.

With that second prize, Marie Curie did something nobody had ever done: she won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences — physics and chemistry. More than a century later, she is still the only person in history to hold that honour.

How Were the Curie Children Educated at Home?

Now the family tree grows a new branch, and it begins, unusually, in a classroom with no school building.

Marie believed her daughters should learn from people who truly loved their subjects. So she joined with famous scholar friends — including physicists Paul Langevin and Jean Perrin — to create a small private school nicknamed “The Cooperative.” About ten children, all sons and daughters of top academics, moved from house to house. Each professor taught the children his or her own specialty in their own home. Alongside serious science, the youngsters studied sculpture and the Chinese language, and they were given plenty of time for sport and fresh air.

Young Irène shone in mathematics. When the First World War began, she trained as a nurse radiographer and went to the battlefields with her mother, helping run mobile X-ray units that located bullets and broken bones inside wounded soldiers. She was still a teenager. After the war she returned to study, earned her doctorate in 1925 with research on polonium — the element her parents had discovered and named — and joined her mother’s Radium Institute in Paris.

To me, this is the most beautiful part of the whole story: the second Nobel generation was not pushed by pressure, but raised inside a home where curiosity was simply the family language, spoken every single day.

1934 and 1935: How Did Irène Joliot-Curie Win Her Nobel Prize?

At the Radium Institute, Irène was asked to teach precise laboratory techniques to a young chemical engineer named Frédéric Joliot. Teacher and student fell in love, and they married on 9 October 1926. Just like Marie and Pierre, the young couple worked side by side, and they even joined their surnames: Joliot-Curie.

Building directly on the parents’ work with natural radioactive elements, Irène and Frédéric achieved something new in 1934: they created radioactivity in the laboratory, turning ordinary aluminium into a radioactive form of phosphorus. Nature had never made this substance. Human beings had, for the first time — artificial radioactivity.

Then came a year of deep sadness. On 4 July 1934, Marie Curie died, worn down by an illness caused by decades of exposure to radiation she could not see or feel. She never learned what happened next.

In 1935, just one year later, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. They became only the second married couple in history to win a Nobel Prize together. The first, of course, was Irène’s own mother and father.

Count the family’s prizes now. Marie: two. Pierre: one. Irène: one. Frédéric: one. Two plus one plus one plus one makes five Nobel Prizes on one family tree.

Did the Family Have a Sixth Nobel Moment?

Almost — and this part deserves honest, plain words.

Marie’s younger daughter Ève chose art over science. She became a pianist and a writer, and in 1937 she published Madame Curie, the famous biography of her mother. The book became an international bestseller, translated into 35 languages, and it is still the work through which much of the world knows Marie’s life.

Ève married an American diplomat, Henry Labouisse. In 1965, Labouisse became executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations children’s organisation. That same year, UNICEF won the Nobel Peace Prize, and Labouisse accepted the prize in Oslo on behalf of the organisation.

Read that sentence carefully: the 1965 Peace Prize belonged to UNICEF, not to Henry Labouisse as a personal award. He stood on the stage as UNICEF’s leader, collecting an honour earned by thousands of workers helping children in more than 100 countries. So the Curie family’s true count stays at five science prizes — with one proud family connection to a sixth Nobel moment.

Why Did the Curie Family Keep Winning?

There was no magic and no luck. Look at the pattern running through every branch of the tree.

First, science was daily life. The Curies discussed experiments the way other families discuss the weather. Second, learning began at home, with The Cooperative giving the children world-class teachers before they ever entered a university. Third, the family worked in pairs. Marie and Pierre, then Irène and Frédéric — each couple shared one laboratory, one subject, and one ambition, doubling their strength. Fourth, nobody stopped. Marie kept working after losing her husband. Irène kept working through a world war. Each generation stood on the exact work of the one before it, and pushed it one step further.

What Price Did the Curie Family Pay?

Glory came with a heavy cost, and no honest telling can hide it. The Curies worked for years with radioactive materials before anyone understood how dangerous those invisible rays were. Marie died in 1934 from an illness caused by that long exposure. Irène died in 1956 of acute leukaemia, linked to her contact with polonium and X-rays. Frédéric, too, died from a disease likely caused by radiation, as did others in the family circle.

Yet the name they paid for so dearly still serves the world. Element number 96 in the periodic table is called curium, named in honour of Marie and Pierre. The Curie Institutes Marie founded in Paris and in Warsaw remain major centres for medical and cancer research today. And every young student who reads about a Polish girl who was barred from university, crossed a continent, and won science’s greatest prize twice, receives the family’s final gift: proof that a determined mind can outgrow every wall built in front of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which family has won the most Nobel Prizes?

The Curie family holds the record. Five Nobel Prizes were won within the family: two by Marie Curie, one by her husband Pierre Curie, one by their daughter Irène Joliot-Curie, and one by Irène’s husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie.

Why did Marie Curie win two Nobel Prizes?

She won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, for research on radioactivity. She then won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on her own, for discovering the elements radium and polonium and isolating radium. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

How did Pierre Curie die?

Pierre Curie died on 19 April 1906 in Paris, when he was struck by a horse-drawn carriage while crossing the Rue Dauphine. He was 46 years old.

Did Marie Curie’s daughter win a Nobel Prize?

Yes. Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering artificial radioactivity — making new radioactive elements in the laboratory. Irène and her mother are still the only mother and daughter pair to both win Nobel Prizes.

Did the Curie family win six Nobel Prizes?

Not exactly. Ève Curie’s husband, Henry Labouisse, accepted the 1965 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF, the organisation he led. That prize belonged to UNICEF, so the family’s personal total remains five — all in physics and chemistry.

Sources

• CNRS News — “Marie Curie, Pioneer and Double Nobel Prize Winner”: https://news.cnrs.fr/opinions/marie-curie-pioneer-and-double-nobel-prize-winner
• Wikipedia — “Curie family”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_family
• Wikipedia — “Irène Joliot-Curie”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ir%C3%A8ne_Joliot-Curie
• Association Curie et Joliot-Curie — “Eve Curie Labouisse” biography: https://curie-joliotcurie.fr/en/about-us/biographies/eve-curie-labouisse/