Marie Curie’s notebooks remain dangerously radioactive today

Evidence

Marie Curie, who discovered polonium and radium, kept detailed laboratory notebooks throughout her career. She worked directly with radioactive materials without protective equipment — the dangers were unknown. When she died of aplastic anemia in 1934, almost certainly caused by her decades of radiation exposure, her notebooks were found to be so radioactive that they could not be handled safely. They remain, to this day, stored in leadlined boxes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Researchers who wish to read them must sign a liability waiver and don protective clothing. The notebooks are scientific documents that are also lethal objects. They encode knowledge in a material form that physically harms the person who approaches them. — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 207

Categorization

• FICTION: The leadlined-boxes detail is a strong image for a story where knowledge itself is hazardous to read.
• XREF: connects to: Curie’s notebooks remain radioactive and usable over a century later — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive: The Complete…, 1705

Related

• Curie’s notebooks remain radioactive and usable over a century later (similarity 0.91)
• Curie read her radiation burns as evidence, not warning (similarity 0.88)