Two Nobel Prizes, a pocketful of radium and a laboratory where the health and safety officer would have fainted on arrival
PASSY, FRANCE, 4 July 1934 - Marie Curie died in a sanatorium in the Haute-Savoie at the age of sixty-six, of a blood disease that her doctors could not explain and that history has since pinned, almost certainly, on a lifetime of exposure to radiation. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win two, and the only one to win in two different sciences. She was also, by any modern standard, the most spectacularly unprotected scientist who ever lived.
What Killed Marie Curie?
The cause of death was aplastic anaemia, a condition in which the bone marrow stops making enough new blood cells. It can be caused by a number of things, including viral infections and some drugs, but exposure to ionising radiation is a classic trigger. For decades Curie had handled radioactive materials with bare hands, breathed in radioactive dust and slept in rooms where radium was stored. Her extensive writing on her research, summarised in the article on Marie Curie, reveals that she suffered repeated bouts of illness, burned fingertips and failing eyesight, but she didn't connect them to her work.
The Glowing Drawers
You can't write about Curie without the glow. She and her husband Pierre isolated radium from tonnes of pitchblende in a draughty shed in Paris, and the result was a few tiny grains of a substance that glowed faintly blue-green in the dark. They were enchanted. Curie later wrote that the radium tubes, left on shelves and tables in the lab, looked like faint fairy lights in the night. She is said to have carried test tubes of radioactive material in her pocket and kept them in her desk drawer. Visitors to the lab remarked on the luminous glow. A modern radiation protection officer would have fallen to the floor at the first sight of it.
The Notebooks That Won't Go Away
Here is the delightful fact that sums it all up. Curie's papers, notebooks and even her cookbooks remain radioactive to this day. The isotope radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years, which means her laboratory notes will be dangerous for centuries to come. They are kept in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and anyone who wishes to consult them has to sign a liability waiver. Imagine the paperwork: "I understand that this notebook may contain traces of historic radium, and I promise not to lick it."
The Health and Safety Inspection
The UK's Health and Safety Executive guidance on radiation runs to hundreds of pages. Curie's laboratory would have broken most of them before breakfast. Picture an inspector arriving at the shed in the Rue Lhomond. "Madam Curie, where is your dosimeter?" "My what?" "Your radiation badge." "I am working with an element nobody understands. I am not wearing a badge." "And where are the lead aprons?" "I've been using the cupboard." The inspector retires to a corner, writes a four-page improvement notice and asks, very politely, whether the glowing thing on the shelf is meant to be there.
The Little Curies
If you only remember one thing about Curie's work outside the lab, make it her war service. When the First World War broke out in 1914, she realised that X-ray machines could help surgeons locate bullets and shrapnel inside wounded soldiers, but the machines were stuck in hospitals far from the front. So she fitted out vehicles with X-ray equipment and generators, trained a team of women to operate them and drove one herself to the front lines. The vehicles became known as petites Curies, "little Curies". By the end of the war, around twenty of them, plus hundreds of fixed X-ray rooms, had examined over a million wounded soldiers. It's one of the finest acts of civilian service in history, and by modern standards it was ruinously dangerous to the people involved.
Could Modern Medicine Have Saved Her?
Possibly. A modern haematologist would treat severe aplastic anaemia with a combination of blood transfusions, immunosuppressive drugs and, in a younger patient, a bone marrow transplant. At sixty-six, with decades of cumulative radiation damage, her prospects would have been uncertain. But above all, a modern radiation safety officer would have prevented the problem in the first place. Lead shielding, dosimeter badges, glove boxes and fume cupboards are now standard in laboratories everywhere. If Curie had worked in a modern lab, she would almost certainly have lived another twenty years and possibly won a third Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize website lists her honours, and there's room for one more.
What Did She Leave Behind?
Curie's daughter Irène, who worked alongside her, went on to win her own Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, and sadly died of leukaemia in 1956, probably also from radiation. Curie's legacy goes beyond the glowing drawers. Her work led to new treatments for cancer, to a better understanding of the atom and to the field of nuclear medicine, which now saves millions of lives. Her story is told in the Britannica biography of Marie Curie. It's not often you find a person whose carelessness with her own health transformed everyone else's.
The Verdict: Preventable, and a Lesson for Us All
Modern doctors might have treated her illness, but modern safety rules would have prevented it. The real lesson is that science needs both brave pioneers and cautious officers, and that you shouldn't keep radioactive material in your pocket. Curie's courage gave us X-rays at the front line and radiotherapy for cancer patients. If anyone says that health and safety has gone mad, remind them of her notebooks, which still need a waiver.
Humorous Observations
- She won two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and her cookbook still needs a Geiger counter.
- Keeping radium in a desk drawer is the most reckless approach to office storage in the history of the filing cabinet.
- Her notebooks are kept in lead-lined boxes, which makes them the world's only literary archive with a radiation rating.
- A modern researcher would have been sent home from work after five minutes in her laboratory, and told to take a long bath.
- The "little Curies" were the most heroic fleet of vans in the history of motoring.
- Pierre Curie died when he was run over by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906, which makes the family's luck truly extraordinary.
- She would have hated the paperwork, but she'd have loved the dosimeter badge.
- If the glow-in-the-dark novelty industry had started with her, we'd all be sleeping under radium stars. https://prat.uk/?p=51093
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