20 Euros Marie Curie

This coin was issued as part of Monnaie de Paris's ongoing commemorative program honoring figures central to French scientific history. Curie remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two separate sciences — Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911 — and the only woman to have won the prize twice. She conducted much of her foundational research on radioactivity in a leaking shed on the Rue Vauquelin in Paris, working without adequate ventilation or protective equipment. Her laboratory notebooks from the 1890s are still too radioactively contaminated to handle safely; they are stored in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.