Marie Curie processed several tonnes of pitchblende by hand in a leaky Paris shed with no floorboards, boiling and filtering the ore for nearly four years to isolate about a tenth of a gram of radium chloride, whose samples glowed faintly in bottles across the shed and slowly damaged her fingertips

Between 1898 and 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie processed tonnes of pitchblende by hand in a leaky Paris shed to isolate roughly a tenth of a gram of radium chloride — a luminous pinch of salt that changed medicine and slowly destroyed her hands. The post Marie Curie processed several tonnes of pitchblende by hand in a leaky Paris shed with no floorboards, boiling and filtering the ore for nearly…