from delancyplace.com:

In today's encore excerpt - Marie
Curie (1867-1934), physicist, chemist and
pioneer in the field of radioactivity:



"The nineteenth century held one last great
surprise for chemists. It began in 1896 when
Henri Becquerel in Paris carelessly left a
packet of uranium salts on a wrapped
photographic plate in a drawer. When he took
the plate out some time later, he was
surprised to discover that the salts had
burned an impression in it, just as if the
plate had been exposed to light. The salts
were emitting rays of some sort.



"Considering the importance of what he had
found, Becquerel did a very strange thing: he
turned the matter over to a graduate student
for investigation. Fortunately the student
was a recent emigre from Poland named Marie
Curie. Working with her new husband, Pierre,
Curie found that certain kinds of rocks
poured out constant and extraordinary amounts
of energy, yet without diminishing in size or
changing in any detectable way. ... Marie
Curie dubbed the effect 'radioactivity.' ...
In 1903 the Curies and Becquerel were jointly
awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. (Marie
Curie would win a second prize, in chemistry,
in 1911, the only person to win in both
chemistry and physics.) ...



"Radiation, of course, went on and on,
literally and in ways nobody expected. In the
early 1900s Pierre Curie began to experience
clear signs of radiation
sickness - notably dull aches in his bones
and chronic feelings of malaise - which
doubtless would have progressed unpleasantly.
We shall never know for certain because in
1906 he was fatally run over by a carriage
while crossing a Paris street.



"Marie Curie spent the rest of her life
working with distinction in the field, ...
[though] she was never elected to the Academy
of Sciences, in large part because after the
death of Pierre she conducted an affair with
a married physicist that was sufficiently
indiscreet to scandalize even the French - or
at least the old men who ran the academy,
which is perhaps another matter."



"For a long time it was assumed that anything
so miraculously energetic as radioactivity
must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers
of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive
thorium in their products, and at least until
the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the
Finger Lakes region of New York (and
doubtless others as well) featured with pride
the therapeutic effects of its 'Radioactive
mineral springs.' Radioactivity wasn't banned
in consumer products until 1938. By this time
it was much too late for Madame Curie, who
died of leukemia in 1934. Radiation, in fact,
is so pernicious and long lasting that even
now her papers from the 1890s - even her
cookbooks - are too dangerous to handle. Her
lab books are kept in leadlined boxes, and
those who wish to see them must don
protective clothing."



Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly
Everything, Broadway, Copyright 2003 by
Bill Bryson, pp. 109-111.