The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris

Summary

The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in ParisEdouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout(Credit: Edouard Taufenbach and Bastien Pourtout)Marie Curie worked with radioactive material with her bare hands. More than 100 years after her groundbreaking work, Sophie Hardach travels to Paris to trace the lingering radioactive fingerprints she left behind.The Geiger counter starts flashing and buzzing as I hold it against the 100-year-old Parisian doorknob. I am standing in the doorway between the historical lab and office of Marie Curie, the Polish-born, Paris-based scientist who invented the word "radioactivity" – and here is an especially startling trace of her. The museum that houses the lab has invited me in here to track radioactive handprints left by her when she worked here in the early 20th Century. Here, on the doorknob, is one such trace. There's another one on the back of her chair. Many more of these invisible traces are dotted all over her archived notes, books and private furniture, some only discovered in recent years. The Geiger counter's reaction, and the numbers on the display, suggest the presence of above-background radioactivity, though only at low and non-threatening levels. In microsievert, which measures the potential impact of radiation on the human body, it comes to about 0.24 microsievert per hour, well within safe limits, according to experts.Marie Curie worked here from 1914 until 1934, the year of her death, handling radioactive elements including radium, which she and her husband Pierre Curie had discovered in 1898. For most of her life, she did this with bare, increasingly radium-scarred hands. She then transferred traces of these elements onto other things she touched. Tracking the handprints through her work spaces, one can imagine how she might have gone "from the lab to the office, opened the door and pulled out the office chair to sit down", says Renaud Huynh, the director of the Curie Museum, as he guides me from trace to tr...