You're listening to "Scientific Giants Who Changed the World." Each episode stands beside one mind and follows a thread of curiosity until it ties to the world we inhabit. Today we descend into a converted shed on the rue Lhomond in Paris, where winter seeps through walls that were never meant to shelter precision work. The air tastes of coal smoke and chemicals. A glass tube glows faintly in the corner—not from any lamp, but from something inside it, something that shouldn't shine at all. At a workbench scarred by acid and heat, a woman in a stained laboratory coat stirs a boiling mass with an iron rod nearly as tall as she is. Her hands will ache tonight; they ache most nights now. She is Marie Curie, and in this cold shed she will make the invisible visible, she will name two elements that rewrite the periodic table, and she will do it at a co ...