Marie Curie

Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end. Other days, on the contrary, the work would be a most minute and delicate fractional crystallization, in the effort to concentrate the radium.

Polish Scientist

Sam Kean

Radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was especially popular: the 'it' element of its day. Radium glows an eerie blue-green in the dark, giving off light for years without any apparent power source. People had never seen anything like it.

American Writer

When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.

Frank Crowninshield

We Americans are mildly interested, of course, in reading about the discovery of radium by Madame Curie, but what we really yearn to know is the name of the uncommemorated French female who first mixed a sauce bearnaise.

American Journalist

In chemical terms, radium differs little from barium; the salts of these two elements are isomorphic, while those of radium are usually less soluble than the barium salts.

Your body thinks radium is a great thing to pack into bone - where it kills some cells outright and scrambles the DNA of others, causing problems like cancer.

The first experiments on the biological properties of radium were successfully made in France, with samples from our laboratory, while my husband was living.

Frederic Joliot-Curie

There is no doubt that radium is transformed spontaneously into an active gas, radon, emitting at the same time alpha particles, or helions.

French Physicist

Walter Dean Myers

My dad was a janitor for U.S. Radium Corporation, and he stayed there for 37 years. So he didn't read.

Pierre Curie

Radium could be very dangerous in criminal hands.

French Scientist

Radium is historically significant in science, especially in studies about radioactivity.

Scientific Importance

Radium has applications in medicine, particularly in the treatment of cancer.

Medical Usage

Remember, radium is radioactive, which means it should be mentioned with caution and awareness of its hazards.

Radioactive Caution

 this time in chemistry for her earlier discovery of radium and polonium, and her extraction and analysis of pure radium and its compounds. This made her the first, and to this date, only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.