Marie Curie and her husband Pierre spent nearly four years boiling and processing tonnes of uraninite in a leaky Paris shed without proper ventilation to isolate a tiny amount of radium, and more than a century later, her notebooks from those experiments remain radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes

More than a century after Marie and Pierre Curie conducted their pioneering experiments on radioactivity, some of Marie Curie’s personal belongings remain radioactive enough to require special handling. Her laboratory notebooks, furniture and other possessions are kept under protective conditions because of contamination left behind by radium.

Between 1899 and 1902, the Curies spent years processing tonnes of pitchblende, a uranium-rich ore, in a poorly equipped Paris laboratory. Their work eventually led to the isolation of radium chloride, with the couple producing only a tiny quantity after years of grinding, boiling, dissolving and recrystallising the material.