Did Marie Curie really carry radium around in her pocket?

Yes. By her own account she kept tubes of radium and polonium in her pocket and in her desk drawer, and enjoyed looking at them glowing faintly in the dark laboratory at night. The dangers of prolonged exposure to radioactive material were not understood at the time, and neither she nor her husband Pierre took any precautions that would now be considered basic.

The consequences were severe and long-lasting. Curie suffered from cataracts, persistent fatigue and lesions on her hands, and she died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia — a failure of the bone marrow to produce blood cells — almost certainly caused by decades of radiation exposure. Pierre had noted burns on his own skin after deliberately strapping a radium sample to his arm to study the effect.

The contamination outlived them both. Curie's laboratory notebooks, her cookbook and much of her furniture remain radioactive. Radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years, so the notebooks will stay dangerous for many centuries. They are held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in lead-lined boxes, and researchers wanting to consult them must sign a waiver and wear protective equipment.

It is worth remembering that Curie was not careless so much as early. She coined the term radioactivity, discovered two elements, and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences — Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. During the First World War she developed mobile radiography units, nicknamed petites Curies, and drove them to the front herself so wounded soldiers could be X-rayed near the field.

The understanding of radiation risk that later protected others was built partly on what happened to her.