Marie Curie made some of the most significant contributions to science in the 20th century. And as most people already know, she did so at a great cost to her own health. [T]he radiation levels she was exposed to were so powerful that her notebooks must now be kept in lead-lined boxes.

Marie Curie was basically walking around with bottles of polonium and radium in her pockets all the time. She even kept capsules full of the dangerous stuff on her shelf.

“One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles of capsules containing our products,” the Nobel Prize-winning scientist wrote in her autobiography.

“It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.”

The radium that Curie carried around in her pockets has a half-life of 1,601 years, so her notebook and other possessions are due to stay in those lead-lined boxes for a long, long, long time…

Via Factually.