It’s a reference, in part, to the fact that Curie—the first woman to win the Nobel prize (despite a nomination that originally named only her husband, Pierre Curie) and the only woman to win it twice—was slowly being killed by her discoveries. Through illness and tragedy, she persisted. Prolonged exposure to radiation over the course of Marie’s career would eventually result in her death from aplastic anemia, a disease that manifests as an insufficient production of blood cells by the body. Pierre, meanwhile, was already so sick by 1903 that it would take another two years for the couple to travel to Stockholm to collect their prize.