A look at the married couples who have won Nobels

MALIN RISING
Associated Press

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Norwegians May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser are not the first husband-and-wife team to win a Nobel Prize together.

Three other couples have shared a Nobel award for their successful collaboration in the sciences, while a Swedish couple won one Nobel Prize each in different categories.

The Mosers shared the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday with U.S.-British scientist John O’Keefe for their discovery of the brain’s positioning system. Here’s a look at the previous married couples who have won Nobel Prizes:

MARIE CURIE AND PIERRE CURIE

In 1903, Polish-born Marie Curie and her French husband Pierre Curie shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Antoine Henri Becquerel for the “their joint researches on the radiation phenomena.” Becquerel’s 1897 discovery of radioactivity had inspired the Curies to investigate it further and they managed to extract two previously unknown elements: polonium and radium, both of which were more radioactive than uranium. While Pierre was killed in a street accident in Paris in 1906, Marie won a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in chemistry for her work in radioactivity.

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FREDERIC JOLIOT and IRENE JOLIOT-CURIE

Irene Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Pierre and Marie, also won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935 together with her husband Frederic Joliot, who worked as an assistant to her mother at the Radium Institute in Paris. Together they researched the structure of the atom, an essential step in the discovery of the neutron. They also took part in building the first French early nuclear reactor in 1948.

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CARL CORI and GERTY CORI

In 1947, Carl Cori and his wife Gerty Cori shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Bernardo Alberto Houssay for “their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen.” The pair married in 1920, the same year they both earned doctorates in medicine from the German University of Prague. They later moved to the United States and worked together in Buffalo, New York, and in St. Louis, Missouri. They became naturalized Americans in 1928.

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ALVA MYRDAL and GUNNAR MYRDAL

Sweden’s Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal, who married in 1924 and were active in the Social Democratic Party, both won Nobel prizes but in different years and in separate categories. Gunnar, a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and a member of the Swedish parliament, shared the 1974 economics prize with Austria’s Friedrich August von Hayek for “their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations.” Eight years later in the midst of the Cold War, diplomat and politician Alva Myrdal shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mexican Alfonso Garcia Robles for their roles in U.N disarmament negotiations.

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