RAFT Hands-On Education

Marie Skłodowska Curie, “Madame Curie,” was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person, and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris. She studied at Warsaw's concealed Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. During World War I, Marie Curie recogni...

In honor of Women's History Month, it is fitting to pay tribute to the woman who is considered one of the greatest biologists of the twentieth century! Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) was an American scientist and  cytogeneticist  who focused on color mosaicism in maize, or corn, during the 1940s. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her groundbreaking work describing the ability of DNA to move between locations within the genome (she is the only woman to receive an unshared  Nobel Prize  in that category). She created the first genetic map for corn and also discovered transposons —mobile genetic elements that tend to move (or “jump”) between locations in the genome. Her work with corn introduced the scientific world to some radical new ideas has had a significant impact on our modern-day understanding of genetics, and paved the way for our understanding of the genome! McClintock’s work with corn demonstrated that transposabl...