![]() The units included tubes of radon gas that Curie purified herself. The needles were also used in the oil industry to chart geological strata.ĭuring World War I, Marie Curie pushed for the use of radiography field units for the treatment of wounded soldiers. ![]() Radium Chemical and other companies leased the needles to hospitals and shipped them all over the country. A technique was developed in which tiny ”needles” filled with radon – a radioactive gas given off by radium – were used to kill cancer cells. Radium’s usefulness in cancer therapy was recognized early in the century. Marie Curie, herself, died from radiation poisoning. As a result, some victims ingested so much radium that their graves still cause Geiger-counter needles to jump. Workers had been instructed to twirl their paint brushes in their mouths to get a fine point. It was not until the early 1920’s, after the first cancer deaths of watch-dial painters at the United States Radium Corporation in East Orange, N.J., that medical authorities began to realize that radium, in even the most minute amounts, was extremely dangerous and long-lasting. It was used on everything from watch dials and instrument panels to theater-seat numbers, eyes for dolls and even fishing lures. Radium’s most widespread use, however, for luminous paint. Pharmacists sold it as an elixir for everything from arthritis and high blood pressure to depression and impotence. Radium was considered a wonder drug when the Radium Chemical Company was founded in New York in 1913. It took Marie over three years to isolate one tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride, for reasons that would not be fully understood until the concept of radioactive decay was developed. ![]() She succeeded in separating radium from barium only with tremendous difficulty. The shed in which this momentous discovery took place, formerly a medical school dissecting room, was poorly outfitted and ventilated. Born in Warsaw, Poland, Marie Curie was the first woman appointed to teach at La Sorbonne (University of Paris) and the first woman in France to achieve her doctoral degree. Marie Curie (Maria Sklodowska-Curie) was the first person in history to obtain two Nobel Prizes in different areas of science (physics and chemistry).
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