Winner of two Nobel Prizes, the first for physics and the second for chemistry. She announced to the world that there are other radioactive elements besides uranium, isolating first the polonium and then the radium, present in very small quantities in pitchblende. Maria she devotes herself to separating radium from barium with the method of fractional crystallization that she has devised and perfected. Radioactivity disrupts the laws of the physical universe that it allowed to glimpse, capturing the imagination of researchers.