Marie Curie

Marie Curie, a Polish scientist, discovered polonium and radium, coined the word radioactivity, and remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She died of aplastic anaemia, brought on by decades of exposure to the material she named.

Born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, four of her planets stood in Scorpio within fifteen degrees of one another: the Sun, Venus, Mars and Saturn. Scorpio is the sign of depth, of privacy, and of an unusual tolerance for uncomfortable truths, and a Sun in it describes somebody built around self-possession and total commitment to whatever they have chosen, for whom nothing can be casual because everything matters too much.

Venus sits on Saturn within a third of a degree, about as close as that pair ever comes: affection under discipline, loyalty, commitment taken seriously, and a difficulty believing you are wanted without evidence for it. Her Sun stands opposite Pluto, the most intense aspect the Sun makes and the one that describes what a person will not let go of. Her Moon, in Pisces, is the opposite instrument entirely, absorbing the mood of a room whether or not it wants to and needing time alone afterwards to work out which of the feelings were its own. You can see how her career and her perseverance are reflected in that reading. At a time when few women were permitted into higher learning institutions, she became more important to science and to history than many of her male contemporaries.

She died in Passy, France on 4 July 1934, on a last quarter Moon, the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details. The Sun had come round to Cancer, water again, the same element it stood in at her birth. Pluto, the planet modern astrology gives to Scorpio, was in easy aspect to both her Venus and her Saturn: durable strength, and rebuilding after loss. Saturn itself had arrived exactly on her Jupiter, closing the cycle that measures how much a life attempts against how much it consolidates. The day reads less like an ending than a crossing. Her work lives on, and she is remembered for it, for her intelligence, and in a charity that bears her name researching cancer treatment.