Marie Curie couldn't legally attend college. So she did it illegally, going to what was known as the 'Flying University', a secret organization. The Flying University was an underground educational network that operated in Poland, which was then under the control of the Russian Empire, and offered courses to women who were excluded from higher education due to gender discrimination. The name "Flying University" was used because the courses were held secretly in various locations, including private homes, to avoid detection by the authorities. Marie Curie was one of the students of the Flying University in her early years, and she attended courses in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The experience she gained from the Flying University helped her in her later academic pursuits and contributed to her groundbreaking discoveries in radioactivity. She went on to become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences: physics and chemistry. The Flying University operated from 1885 to 1905. The Flying University underwent an official transformation in 1920, and it became the Free Polish University, a fully accredited academic institution.



As a young woman during World War I, Irène Joliot-Curie (left) worked with her mother Marie Skłodowska Curie (right) to provide mobile X-ray units for wounded soldiers. They are pictured here at the Hoogstade Hospital in Belgium in 1915.

After the war she resumed her studies and later worked at the institute founded by her parents - Marie and Pierre Curie. There she conducted her Nobel Prize-awarded work together with fellow researcher Frédéric Joliot, who she married in 1926.

Irène shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband "in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements" after they were the first people in history to create a radioactive element artificially.

There will always be skeptics to new ideas, theories and discoveries. If these skeptics provide reasoning for their skepticism, then they should be listened to, and effort should be made to resolve the anomalies pointed out by them. But if the skeptics have a closed mind, and they offer no reasoning but fixed ideas only, then they should be ignored outright.
Both Albert Einstein and Marie Curie had their share of skeptics. In 1911, Einstein advised Curie as follows:
"If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated." Here is Einstein’s letter to Curie in full:

“Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,

“Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels.

Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real

people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.


“With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,


“A. Einstein

“P.S. I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck’s radiation field by means of a comical witticism, naturally under the constraint that the structure’s motion follows the laws of standard mechanics. My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though.”
Grateful for Einstein's support during a time when she was being attacked by the press and others in the scientific community, Curie would go on to become great friends with Einstein.