What Marie Curie Left Behind

It is a good bet that if most scientists and engineers were honest, they would most like to leave something behind that future generations would remember. While Marie Curie met …read more

Jun 11, 2025 - 10:40

It is a good bet that if most scientists and engineers were honest, they would most like to leave something behind that future generations would remember. While Marie Curie met that standard — she was the first woman to win the Nobel prize because of her work with radioactivity, and a unit of radioactivity (yes, we know — not the SI unit) is a Curie. However, Curie also left something else behind inadvertently: radioactive residue. As the BBC explains, science detectives are retracing her steps and facing some difficult decisions about what to do with contaminated historical artifacts.

Marie was born in Poland and worked in Paris. Much of the lab she shared with her husband is contaminated with radioactive material transferred by the Curies’ handling of things like radium with their bare hands.

Some of the traces have been known for years, including some on the lab notebooks the two scientists shared. However, they are still finding contamination, including at her family home, presumably brought in from the lab.

There is some debate about whether all the contamination is actually from Marie. Her daughter, Irène, also used the office. The entire story starts when Marie realized that radioactive pitchblende contained uranium and thorium, but was more radioactive than those two elements when they were extracted. The plan was to extract all the uranium and thorium from a sample, leaving this mystery element.

It was a solid plan, but working in a store room and, later, a shed with no ventilation and handling materials bare-handed wasn’t a great idea. They did isolate two elements: polonium (named after Marie’s birth country) and radium. Research eventually proved fatal as Marie succumbed to leukemia, probably due to other work she did with X-rays. She and her husband are now in Paris’ Pantheon, in lead-lined coffins, just in case.

If you want a quick video tour of the museum, [Sem Wonders] has a video you can see, below. If you didn’t know about the Curie’s scientist daughter, we can help you with that. Meanwhile, you shouldn’t be drinking radium.