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The hunt for Marie Curie's radioactive fingerprints in Paris

Marie Curie worked with radioactive material with her bare hands. More than 100 years later, Sophie Hardach travels to Paris to trace the radioactive fingerprints she left behind.

In Marie Curie's description, the shed was furnished with "some worn pine tables, a cast-iron stove" – and it lacked any safety provisions whatsoever: "There were no hoods to carry away the poisonous gases thrown off in our chemical treatments". Dating from those early years in the hangar, the note captures a crucial moment in their research, Huynh explains: "It's where she calculates the atomic weight of radium," a key step in their quest to prove that this new element exists, he says. In fact, Frédéric Joliot, the Curies' son-in-law, made a print of this lab note with a photographic plate in the 1950s to show the contamination, and also measured it with a ticking Geiger counter – possibly making him the first person to investigate his extended family's radioactive heritage.

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