Marie Curie discovers two new elements, polonium and radium, while working out of a converted shed in Paris with her husband Pierre, sifting through tons of pitchblende ore to isolate radioactive material by hand. Host Hank Green narrates her path from a childhood in Russian-occupied Poland, where she studied secretly at an underground "Flying University," to the Sorbonne, where she becomes the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first person to win two, in physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911. The episode covers the cost as plainly as the achievement: Curie carried test tubes of radium in her pockets and kept samples by her bed, and the exposure eventually caused the aplastic anemia that killed her. It also credits her practical wartime work, designing mobile X-ray units, nicknamed "petites Curies," that she drove to the front lines to help treat wounded soldiers. Green keeps the tone brisk and admiring, moving quickly through the science and the biography without slowing down for either.