Marie Curie

The notebooks she used in the 1890s are still radioactive. Radium's half-life is sixteen hundred years, so they will stay that way. Her cookbook and her furniture are contaminated too.

Nobody knew the danger then. She wrote that the faint blue glow of radium solutions in the dark was beautiful, and would go to the lab at night to look at it. She carried tubes in her pocket.

The working conditions: boiling, stirring and filtering tons of pitchblende in a shed for nearly four years to obtain a tenth of a gram of radium chloride. The roof leaked; in winter there was one stove.

The 1903 physics nomination originally listed only her husband and Becquerel. A member of the Swedish academy warned Pierre, who protested, and her name was added. In 1911 she took the chemistry prize alone.

When war came she fitted out twenty vehicles with X-ray equipment and sent them to the front. She learned to drive, and went forward herself with her daughter Irène. The soldiers called them petites Curies.

The question that remainsOf a woman who saved others with the substance that killed her — what should we say we have learned?