The Radioactive Legacy of a Scientific Giantess Marie Curie's notebooks, scribbled in by her own radioactive fingers, remain as treacherous today as they were over a century ago.
The lead lined boxes that hold them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France are a poignant reminder of the Curies' pioneering work in harnessing the power of radioactivity – and the devastating cost it exacted on their lives.
The Curies spent nearly four years boiling down seven tonnes of pitchblende, isolating just one tenth of a gram of radium chloride in a makeshift laboratory workspace behind the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry.