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

Marie Curie's personal items remain radioactive more than a century after her groundbreaking research. Her notebooks and possessions are stored with protective measures due to radium contamination. The Curies processed tonnes of pitchblende in a basic Paris laboratory for their work. Radium-226's long half-life of 1,600 years ensures its persistent radioactivity. These traces of their experiments continue to be measurable for many centuries.