🧪 Today, more than 100 years after the Curies’ (Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie) discovery of radium, even the public is well aware of the potential dangers associated with the exposure of the human body to radioactive elements. Yet, from the very first years during which the scientists and their contemporaries were pioneering the study of radioactivity until the mid-1940s, little was concretely understood about both short and long-term health effects.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ Pierre liked to keep a sample in his pocket so he could demonstrate its glowing and heating properties to the curious, and even once strapped a vial of the stuff to his bare arm for ten hours in order to study the curious way it painlessly burned his skin. Curie, in turn, kept a sample at home next to her bed as a nightlight. Diligent researchers, the Curies spent nearly every day in the confines of their improvised laboratory, with various radioactive materials strewn about their workspaces. After regularly handling Radiu...