In 1911, Albert Einstein penned a letter to Marie Curie in which he told her to stay strong in the face of extreme personal criticism: “If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.” By that time Curie had already proved herself a brilliant scientist—she had won the Nobel Prize for her work with radioactivity in 1903 and in 1911 became the first woman to run the physics laboratory at the Sorbonne—but was coming under fire for her personal life.