The Economic Times

Marie & Pierre Curie's belongings: Even after more than 120 years, why everything Nobel Prize-winning couple touched is still kept in lead-lined boxes

Marie Curie's notebooks remain radioactive more than a century later because they were contaminated with radium-226, an element with a half-life of around 1,600 years. As a result, the manuscripts require special handling, with researchers wearing protective equipment to access them. Marie and Pierre Curie worked under extremely challenging conditions to isolate radium, and their groundbreaking discoveries went on to transform science, medicine and our understanding