One hundred years ago this month, on 28 December 1898, Pierre Curie, Marie Sklodowska-Curie and Gustave Bémont published a paper in Comptes-rendus - the journal of the French Academy of Sciences. In the paper they announced that they had discovered a new element with astonishing properties: radium. But for one of the authors, Marie Curie, the paper was more than just the result of outstanding work: it showed that a woman could succeed in what was then very much a male-dominated scientific world.
Having arrived in Paris from Poland in 1891, Marie Curie became the first woman in France to obtain a PhD in physics, the first woman to win a Nobel prize and the first woman to teach at the Sorbonne. She also helped to found a new scientific discipline: the study of radioactivity.
She became an icon and a role-model for other women to follow, someone who succeeded - despite many difficulties - in imposing herself on the world of science.
Although Curie's life story is a familiar and well documented one, there is one side to her that is less well known: her interaction with industry. As well as training many nuclear physicists and radiochemists in her laboratory, she also became a scientific pioneer in industrial collaboration.
In the December issue of Physics World, Soraya Boudia from the Curie Muesum in Paris writes about this side of Marie Curie.