A Pioneer; Marie Curie

Maria Sklodowska-Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish-born French physicist who pioneered the study of radioactivity.

She moved to Paris to pursue her education where she met and married Pierre Curie, a physicist, and together they discovered two new radioactive elements: polonium which was named after Marie's native country and radium from the Latin word for "ray".  

She became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 along with Pierre and Henri Becquerel, for their work in radiation phenomena.  She became the first woman professor of physics at the Sorbonne and she won a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. 

Curie applied her knowledge of radioactivity to medicine and developed mobile x-ray units to help wounded soldiers during WWI.  In 1920 her health started to fail and she died 14 years later from aplastic anemia likely caused by radiation due her exposure to radiography.

The Founder; Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in 1845 in Germany.  When he was 3 years old, his family moved to the Netherlands.  He started his studies at the University of Utrecht and completed at Zurich's Polytechnic from which he graduated in 1869 with a PhD in mechanical engineering.

On November 8, 1895 while he was studying the passage of an electric current through a gas of extremely low pressure, the cathode ray tube, he discovered a new kind of rays, he called X-rays.  His discovery revolutionised the field of medicine and for his discovery was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.  The first application in medicine was when he exposed his wife hand, on the same day, in the path of x-rays over a photographic plate and he observed after developing it, the image of his wife hand showing shadows of the bones and soft tissues of the hand and of the ring she was wearing.  This was the first "röntgenogram" ever taken. 

In spite of the numerous honours, Röntgen was a modest, amiable and polite man who preferred working alone.  He built most of the apparatuses he used with great ingenuity and experimental skill.  His discovery created the specialty of Radiology (Diagnostic and Therapeutic) a sine qua non in the practice of modern medicine.