Five Scientists Who Won the Nobel Prize Twice — and What Their Lives Tell Us About Curiosity

The Nobel Prize is the highest honour in science. Fewer than a dozen scientists win it each year, chosen from a global pool by committees that deliberate for months. Winning once places a person among the most celebrated figures in the history of human knowledge.

Winning twice is something else entirely. In the 125-year history of the prize, only five individuals have done it.

These five did not simply repeat themselves. Each won in domains that required fundamentally different kinds of thinking — or pressed so far into a single field that they transformed it twice from the inside.

Their stories are not just records of achievement. They are case studies in what sustained scientific ambition looks like across a lifetime — the costs it exacts, the obstacles it meets, and the mark it leaves. This is the full story of each, and what their lives reveal about scientific greatness.

Marie Curie (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911)

Marie Curie was not only the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. She was the first woman to win one, the first person to win in two different scientific disciplines, and the only person whose prizes span physics and chemistry.

Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw in 1867, under Russian imperial rule, where women were barred from university. She studied in secret at the underground “Flying University,” taught in private apartments at real risk to everyone involved.

In 1891 she moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne, one of very few women there. She lived in poverty, studying in an unheated garret sometimes too cold to write, and finished first in physics and second in mathematics.

She met Pierre Curie in 1894. Their partnership became a marriage, and their marriage one of the most productive scientific collaborations in history. Working in a leaking shed through brutal winters, they processed tonnes of pitchblende to isolate two unknown elements — polonium, named for her occupied homeland, and radium.

The 1903 Physics Nobel went to Becquerel and the Curies for radioactivity. Marie was initially omitted — the committee intended to honour only Becquerel and Pierre. Pierre refused to accept under those terms. The committee relented, and Marie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize.

Pierre died in 1906, struck by a horse-drawn wagon in a Paris street. Marie took over his Sorbonne professorship — the first woman to hold one there — and continued alone. In 1911 she won the Chemistry Nobel for isolating radium and polonium, work the Academy noted she had largely done by herself after Pierre’s death.

That same year, the French Academy of Sciences denied her admission by a single vote, on the grounds that she was a woman. She never applied again.

The radioactive materials were slowly killing her. She carried test tubes of isotopes in her coat pockets. Her notebooks remain radioactive today, stored in lead-lined boxes and handled only with signed waivers. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, her bone marrow destroyed by decades of exposure.

Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won the 1935 Chemistry Nobel. Marie Curie is the only person whose child also received a Nobel — the family has won five across two generations.

John Bardeen (Physics 1956, Physics 1972)

John Bardeen is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same discipline, and the only one to have led two entirely separate research programmes that each produced a Nobel result. He may be the most consequential physicist of the twentieth century whose name is not Einstein or Feynman.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1908, Bardeen was quietly brilliant — an undergraduate degree in three years, several years as a geophysicist, then a PhD at Princeton under Eugene Wigner. He was modest, methodical, and deeply collaborative, unusual among the dramatic individualists of his era.

At Bell Laboratories in the late 1940s, Bardeen worked with William Shockley and Walter Brattain on semiconductor amplification. In December 1947 the three demonstrated the transistor — a small piece of germanium that could amplify electrical signals.

The transistor replaced the bulky, fragile vacuum tube. Everything in modern electronics is built on it — the chip in your phone holds tens of billions of transistors. The 1956 Physics Nobel went to Bardeen, Shockley, and Brattain for the invention.

Bardeen left Bell Labs, partly over friction with Shockley, for the University of Illinois. There he attacked a problem that had resisted solution for half a century: superconductivity, in which certain materials cooled near absolute zero conduct electricity with exactly zero resistance.

Working with Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer, he developed BCS theory — the first complete microscopic theory of superconductivity. The key insight was that at very low temperatures electrons form Cooper pairs that condense into a quantum state flowing without resistance. The 1972 Physics Nobel went to all three.

Bardeen thus won for the two most consequential physics contributions of the century — the transistor, which made the information age possible, and BCS theory, which underpins the superconducting qubits at the heart of quantum computers. For how those qubits now power real machines, see our article on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2025.

He kept working into his seventies, publishing on high-temperature superconductivity shortly before his death in 1991, aged 82.

Frederick Sanger (Chemistry 1958, Chemistry 1980)

Frederick Sanger is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, and among the most technically inventive scientists in the history of biology. Where Curie and Bardeen made conceptual breakthroughs, Sanger’s genius was methodological — he invented two techniques that transformed what biology could do.

Born in Gloucestershire in 1918, the son of a Quaker doctor, Sanger was quiet and almost aggressively modest. He described himself as not academically brilliant and credited persistence and a willingness to try things that might fail. He spent his entire career at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

His first prize solved a problem that had defeated biochemists for decades: reading the amino-acid sequence of a protein. He spent ten years developing methods to break insulin into identifiable fragments and work out their order.

In 1955 he published the complete sequence of insulin — the first protein ever sequenced. The 1958 Chemistry Nobel was awarded to him alone.

He then turned to an even harder target: DNA. Through the 1960s and 70s he developed ever more powerful methods, culminating in 1977 in Sanger sequencing — using modified nucleotides that halt DNA copying at specific points, producing readable fragments of known length.

With it, his team sequenced the first complete genome — a bacteriophage — in 1977. The 1980 Chemistry Nobel was shared by Sanger, Walter Gilbert, and Paul Berg.

Sanger sequencing remained the dominant DNA technology for three decades. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, used it to read all three billion base pairs. For the molecule at the centre of that work, see our article on what DNA is and how it works.

He retired in 1983, returned to his Cambridge garden, and declined all further honours — including a knighthood, which he refused because he did not want to be called “Sir.” He died in 2013, aged 95, apparently unbothered by his extraordinary legacy.

Linus Pauling (Chemistry 1954, Peace 1962)

Linus Pauling is the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes — both awarded to him alone — and the only one to win in two completely different fields: chemistry and peace. He may be the closest the twentieth century came to a universal scientific genius in the old polymath tradition.

Born in Portland, Oregon in 1901, Pauling was voraciously curious, a self-taught reader who studied chemistry at Oregon Agricultural College before a PhD at Caltech. There he encountered the new quantum mechanics from Europe and immediately grasped its implications for chemistry — implications almost no chemist had yet worked out.

His central insight was that chemistry could be understood quantum mechanically — that bond properties, molecular shapes, and structural stability all followed from quantum mechanics. His concepts of electronegativity, resonance, and hybridisation are taught in every introductory chemistry course today.

His 1939 book The Nature of the Chemical Bond is one of the most cited scientific texts of the century. He applied the same structural thinking to biology, proposing the alpha helix and beta sheet — two fundamental protein structures — with Robert Corey in 1951.

That same period, Watson and Crick were racing to solve DNA, and Pauling was their most feared rival. He published a proposed triple-helix DNA structure in early 1953 that turned out to be wrong — a rare stumble. Watson and Crick published the correct double helix two months later.

Pauling received the 1954 Chemistry Nobel for his work on the chemical bond. But his second prize marked a different kind of life. He had grown politically active, campaigning against nuclear weapons testing and the dangers of radioactive fallout.

The US State Department revoked his passport in 1952 — meaning he missed a London conference where he might have seen the X-ray images that could have helped him solve DNA. It was restored in 1954, in time for him to collect his chemistry prize in Stockholm.

He circulated a petition eventually signed by more than 11,000 scientists calling for a nuclear test ban. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. The 1962 Peace Nobel — awarded the day after the treaty was signed — went to Pauling. He remains the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes.

Karl Barry Sharpless (Chemistry 2001, Chemistry 2022)

Barry Sharpless is the most recent double laureate and the second, after Sanger, to win two Chemistry Nobels. His prizes came 21 years apart — the longest gap of any double laureate — for two distinct contributions to synthetic chemistry.

Born in Philadelphia in 1941, Sharpless studied at Dartmouth and Stanford and spent most of his career at MIT and Scripps Research. He is known as one of the most creative and unconventional thinkers in organic chemistry — a field that tends toward the systematic, and in which he was neither.

His first Nobel, shared with William Knowles and Ryoji Noyori in 2001, recognised asymmetric catalytic oxidation — methods that add oxygen to molecules to produce a specific mirror-image form of the product.

This matters because mirror-image molecules can behave completely differently in the body — one form may be a medicine, the other useless or toxic. Sharpless’s methods made producing the right form reliable, which is essential to modern pharmaceutical manufacturing.

His second Nobel, shared with Carolyn Bertozzi and Morten Meldal in 2022, recognised click chemistry — a concept he proposed in 2001. The idea is to build molecules from reactions that are fast, reliable, and byproduct-free, snapping together like Lego pieces.

Click chemistry transformed how chemists build complex molecules in pharmaceuticals, materials science, and biology, where it lets molecules be labelled and tracked inside living cells. Bertozzi extended it to bioorthogonal chemistry — reactions that run inside living organisms without disrupting their biochemistry.

Sharpless lost the sight of one eye in a 1970 lab accident. He has described it as a turning point that changed how he thought about risk and creativity. He continued researching for more than five decades, receiving his second Nobel at 81.

What These Five Lives Have in Common

Looked at together, the five do not fit a single archetype. Curie worked in a field actively hostile to her presence. Bardeen collaborated in an era of scientific individualism. Sanger was a methodologist who distrusted grand theories. Pauling was a theorist who believed chemistry could be unified under quantum mechanics. Sharpless was an iconoclast who wanted to redesign his field’s foundations.

What they share is not a personality type. It is a willingness to keep working at the frontier after recognition — to resist consolidating a safe position and instead move into new territory where failure was again possible. Each, after their first Nobel, chose a harder problem rather than an easier one.

They also share an unusual relationship with failure. Curie’s later work was built partly on grief and endurance. Sanger’s DNA sequencing took fifteen years to work reliably. Pauling was wrong about DNA in a very public way. Sharpless lost an eye and rebuilt his research. Bardeen walked away from one of physics’ most competitive environments and started over.

The Nobel Prize is awarded for success. But the stories of those who won it twice are largely stories of what happened in between — of work that did not immediately succeed, of persistence through difficulty, and of the choice to keep going when stopping would have been entirely reasonable.

For a scientist who shaped the foundations several of these laureates built on, see our article on Paul Dirac, the physicist who predicted antimatter. And for a scientist who turned curiosity itself into a method, see Richard Feynman.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Nobel Prize — Marie Curie
• Nobel Prize — John Bardeen
• Nobel Prize — Frederick Sanger
• Nobel Prize — Linus Pauling
• Nobel Prize — Barry Sharpless
• Wikipedia — List of Nobel Laureates