Who was the first woman to become a great scientist?

Marie Curie, a French physicist, was the first woman to achieve great fame in science. She was born in Poland in 1867 and married the French scientist, Pierre Curie, in 1895. Her main interest was radioactively in uranium ore, Marie Curie identified radium in 1898. Four years later, she managed to prepare the element itself, having extracted less than a gram of radium metal from several tons of ore. In 1934, she died of leukaemia, a form of cancer probably caused by her lengthy exposure to radioactively in her work.