Innovators, from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to the writer Gabriel García Marquez and China's Yuan Longping, who pioneered research into hybrid rice breeding, are celebrated in this WIP image. Credit: WIPO
Today is World Intellectual Property Day, a day to celebrate the visionary innovators around the globe, past and present, who have changed our lives down through the ages as a result of their pioneering innovations.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) first designated 26 April as World IP Day back in 1970.
Since then, each year World IP Day is celebrated in countries around the world to showcase some of the greatest innovators that helped shape everything from medicine to music and arts advancements since time began. This year’s theme is ‘Visionary Inventors’.
For instance, in Ireland today, there is an event being hosted in Dublin at William Fry’s offices about how Ireland can become the Silicon Valley of Europe. Sean O’Sullivan, managing director of SOSventures and ‘dragon’ on RTÉ’s Dragons’ Den, will be speaking about IP at the event this afternoon.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie. Image by Wikimedia Commons
Here we take a look at Marie Curie, the Polish-born physicist and chemist who was the first person to be honoured with two Nobel Prizes (for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911). She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.
Curie is famed for her pioneering work on radioactivity.
She was born Marie Skłodowska-Curie on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, Poland.
Curie shared her 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with her husband, the French physicist Pierre Curie, and with the French physicist Henri Becquerel.
Then, in 1911, she was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia as a result of years of exposure to radiation.
Check out the World IP Day Facebook page for more information about what’s happening around the world today.
