When you think of women Nobel Prize winners, the first name that probably comes to mind is that of Polish-French scientist Marie Curie.
Click start to play our final Nobel Prize-themed Weekend Crossword, which focuses on people who won the prize for Peace.
Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel – she shared the 1903 physics award with her husband Pierre and fellow French scientist Henri Becquerel, for pioneering work in radioactivity. She was also the first woman to receive her own, unshared award – the 1911 chemistry prize – for discovering the elements radium and polonium. Curie is the only person, man or woman, to ever win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
And that’s not all – Nobel prizes run in her family. Along with her husband Pierre, her daughter and son-in-law shared the 1935 chemistry prize. And when the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) won the Peace prize in 1965, her other son-in-law was its director.
Another woman who holds the position of ‘the first’ in Nobel history is Baroness Bertha von Suttner – she was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1905. The Austrian pacifist and novelist was the author of an influential anti-war novel, and campaigned ardently for countries to get rid of their weapons and armed forces – a process known as disarmament – and for world leaders to come together for peace. In fact, she is also responsible for convincing Alfred Nobel to include a peace prize in his bequest, according to History.com.
In the field of literature, Swedish author Selma Lagerlof was the first woman to take home the Nobel in 1909. She was awarded the prize for “in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception that characterise her writings”, according to the Nobel Prize website.
At the start of the Second World War, Lagerlof sent her Nobel Prize medal and the gold medal she received from the Swedish Academy to the government of Finland, to help raise money to fight the Soviet Union. The Finnish government was so touched, it raised the necessary money through other means and made sure her medals were returned to her.
The first woman to win the Nobel for Physiology or Medicine was American biochemist Gerty Theresa Cori, who shared the award in 1947, for discovering how sugar-derived glycogen is used by the body as a source of energy. And finally, American economist Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel in economics, in 2009. The prize for economics wasn’t established until 1969 and Ostrom finally became the first woman to win it for her groundbreaking analysis of 'common property'.
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