The Notebooks That Will Kill You
September 5, 2026 · by White Nights
Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium, coined the term radioactivity, and won the Nobel Prize twice — once in Physics in 1903, shared with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, and once in Chemistry in 1911, alone. She remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Her notebooks from the 1890s and early 1900s are still radioactive. They're kept in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Anyone who wants to examine them has to sign a liability waiver and wear protective clothing. They will be dangerously radioactive for another 1,500 years.
Curie didn't know the work was killing her. Nobody did. Radioactivity was newly discovered, the hazards poorly understood, and she worked with radium directly — carrying it in her pockets, storing vials on her bedside table, noting that the blue-green glow in her dark lab was rather beautiful. She developed aplastic anaemia, a bone marrow disease caused by radiation exposure, and died of it in 1934.
She did all of this as a woman in late-nineteenth-century science, which meant fighting for laboratory access, being excluded from the French Academy of Sciences despite being twice a Nobel laureate, and having her work routinely attributed to her husband. When Pierre died in a street accident in 1906, she was offered his professorship at the Sorbonne and became the first woman to hold a chair there. She gave her first lecture to a packed hall and received a standing ovation before saying a word.
Her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1935.