Did Early Scientists Researching Radioactivity, Such As Marie Curie, Suffer Any Ill Effects From The Materials They Handled?

[sandyRoe]

They couldn't have known how dangerous it was.

[Old_Geezer]

Yes. I think she died of cancer. Check Wikipedia.

[Milvus]

It's thought Marie Curie's death was caused by long term contact with radiation. Her husband died in a road accident. M. Curies papers remain too radioactive to handle safely. Many early workers using radioactive materials died of cancers (eg the manufacture of luminous watches)

[Old_Geezer]

"Curie died in 1934 at the sanatorium of Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France, due to aplastic anemia brought on by exposure to radiation – mainly, it seems, during her World War I service in mobile x-ray units created by her.[6]"

[Hypognosis]

//They couldn't have known how dangerous it was. //

No-one did. There was a whole industry which sprang up, even as far as products like toothpaste or tablets to be swallowed. Most of these have been rounded up and put in museums but I dare say there are things like clocks or aircraft instrument dials, still circulating around car boot sales and so on, which glow in the dark (all night, not phosphorescent) due to radium paint markings.

In reality the traces of radiation off things like those is probably no worse than living in a house above granite bedrock where radon gas can build up (once you fit double glazing and draught excluders, that is).

[boxtops]

We've been watching that prog on BBC4 about the development of vaccines and drugs, so many early inventors tested things on themselves.

[Peter Pedant]

O hayzoos yes (or ....si)

Her lab tech died from anaemia and she was in a denial

and she died 1927 from undiagnosed and denied aplastic anemia 2' to radiation

but she did for a long period carry around 1mg of Radium around with her [and show it to people saying look at this!]

[EdgeofDarkness]

Categorically yes. And the history available now doesn't tell half of it. Certainly Marie Curies's life was cut short by radiation poisoning. But how many people who transported the pitchblende, or helped her to prepare it ? I doubt if that information can be found now. On the Manhattan project at least one worker fried themselves in situ - that was through accidental exposure to a critical mass. I think several others died from effects after the war. Check Fermi, for one. He was cavalier.

[EdgeofDarkness]

Checking in Otto (Robert) Frisch's 'What Little I Remember', I see that the Los Alamos casualty happened in this way. The theorists already had a very good idea as to what constituted a critical mass, but this needed to be tested. The way they devised to do that was to drop a plug of U-235 near to a doughnut of the same, on a piece of string. Neither the plug, nor the doughnut in themselves constituted a critical mass, but their masses together did. The built-in fail-safe was that if the operator (who was measuring the radiation levels as the masses approached each other) collapsed, the plug would fall straight through the hole in the doughnut, under the effect of gravity, so quickly that an explosion would not occur. One operator's pencil became entangled in the string - so much for theory - unfortunately for him, but fortunately for the rest of Los Alamos the entanglement didn't leave the plug and doughnut perfectly aligned.