Marie Curie's story bridges millennia of human ambition — from the ancient alchemists who dreamed of transmuting elements to the nuclear age her discoveries made possible. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two in different sciences, and a researcher whose work with radioactivity literally killed her while opening the door to modern physics and medicine.

This episode traces Curie from her clandestine education in occupied Poland through her groundbreaking Paris laboratory and the personal scandals that nearly destroyed her career, showing how one woman's relentless curiosity connected humanity's oldest scientific dreams to the space age.

• How Curie smuggled her education in underground Polish classrooms under Russian occupation
• The painstaking isolation of radium and polonium from tons of ...