Where am I and what am I doing? I’m in a foreign capital city, deep in a large, beautiful building, wearing a lead apron and gloves. I’ve signed a waiver for anything bad that happens, and I’m getting ready to open a lead-lined box. All because I love books. What’s your guess?

I’m in Paris, at the Bibliothèque Nationale, hovering over the lead box containing the highly radioactive lab notebooks of Marie and Pierre Curie.

In the early 2000s, scientists tested the Curies’ lab notebooks and found them to be highly radioactive. Because of their levels of radioactive contamination, their papers from the 1890-1910 era are considered too dangerous to handle. They are now kept at the French Bibliotheque Nationale in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing and sign a waiver.

What a powerhouse Marie Curie was! She and her husband Pierre Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for their work developing the theory of radioactivity (a word she invented). Her second Nobel Prize, in 1911 was in the field of Chemistry, for her discovery of the elements polonium (named after her homeland Poland) and radium (from the Latin word for ray). This made her the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and the only person to win Nobels in two different scientific fields (Linus Pauling is the only other to win two- one in Chemistry and one in Peace). She and her husband were the first couple to win a Nobel.

Of particular interest to those of us in medical fields, she directed the first studies on the use of radioactive isotopes to treat malignancies.

From 1896 to 1905, Marie and Pierre worked to isolate radioactive elements they found in pitchblend. A laborious process, requiring chemical processing of several tons of pitchblend, this took place outside in a courtyard, next to their rather primitive shed laboratory. They kept tiny vials of radium in their pockets, on shelves, in drawers, enjoying the faint light the vials emitted. Marie Curie wrote, “One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles of capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.”

Pierre did notice that his hands and arms became raw and peeled after exposure to radium. He once taped a vial of radium to his arm, observing that sores developed in his skin. This led him to postulate that radium could treat tumors. He and Marie and others in the lab learned that carrying a vial in their pocket for any length of time would lead to a sore spot in nearby skin that was very slow to heal. Both Curies eventually developed scarred hands. Pierre was also plagued with a persistent cough and vague illnesses. His legs shook and he had considerable generalized pain. His doctor diagnosed neurasthenia (a great catch-all diagnosis of that era) and prescribed strychnine. All their illnesses were blamed on the drafty shed, poor working conditions, and overexertion. They were constantly, unknowingly, exposed to damaging radioactivity, having no idea how dangerous it was.

Pierre died young, in 1906 when he was run over by a horse carriage. Marie’s research continued.

In 1914, Marie was worried about the safety of her radium and her research, as German troops headed toward Paris in the early days of WWI. She bundled her radium and equipment in a lead-lined box, deposited it in a bank in Bordeaux, and returned to Paris. She developed mobile x-ray units (they looked like ambulances), known as petites Curies (“Little Curies”), arranged funding to build twenty of them, and took them to field hospitals during WWI, so wounded soldiers could have diagnostic x-rays. She (and her teenage daughter Irene) also trained over two hundred women to perform x-rays and arranged two hundred x-ray stations to be built at field hospitals. It is estimated that a million soldiers had x-rays due to this invention. Of course, there was no shielding, and many people got burns from the x-ray exposure. So little was known then….

Later in life, Marie suffered from constant fatigue and anemia. By then she realized that constant exposure to radioactivity had had a deleterious effect on her health. In her later years she acknowledged but did not regret her significant radiation exposure during her years of research, and while running the unshielded portable x-ray units. Marie lived until 1934, dying at age 66 of aplastic anemia.

The Curie Museum was established in 1934 in the Curie Pavilion of the Institut du Radium in Paris, not far from the Sorbonne. It includes the laboratory and research equipment used during her later years. In 1981, the lab was decontaminated (including removing lots of radioactive dirt from the courtyard) and expanded with more exhibition rooms. It continues today as a fascinating museum (perfectly safe to visit!).

Sixty years after Marie’s death, in 1995, in honor of their achievements, the remains of both Curies were transferred from their original graves to the Paris Pantheon, where they were placed in lead-lined coffins, due to the persistent radioactivity of their bodies. They remain there, along with other French greats like Dumas, Braille, Hugo, Rousseau, Voltaire and Zola.

Radioactive bodies, radioactive lab, radioactive dirt, radioactive notebooks! What a life they lived!

The half-life of Radium-226 is 1,600 years, so those notebooks are going to be glowing and dangerous for the next 1,500 years. Plan your visit accordingly!