Why Marie Curie’s belongings are still kept in lead-lined boxes

Marie Curie and her husband spent nearly four years boiling down seven tonnes of pitchblende in a leaky Paris shed with no ventilation to isolate one-tenth of a gram of radium chloride. Today, the notebooks they kept during those years, between 1899 and 1902, are kept in lead-lined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Anyone who wants to see them has to sign a waiver and wear protective gear beforehand. The same is the case with her cookbooks, furniture, doorknobs of her old apartment and even her coffin.The radioactivity she and Pierre coaxed out of eight tonnes of Bohemian pitchblende in a leaky Paris shed has a half-life of 1,600 years and will still be measurable when the person reading this is mere dust. Half-life is the amount of time it takes for a radioactive nucleus in a sample to decay into a more stable element.