The same radioactivity that made Marie Curie famous also killed her. She and her colleagues worked for decades with almost no protection, carrying test tubes of radioactive isotopes in her pockets and storing them in her desk drawer, and she remarked in her own notes on the pretty blue-green light the materials gave off in the dark, unaware of what steady exposure to that light was costing her. She died in 1934 of aplastic anemia, a bone marrow failure now understood to be a direct consequence of decades of radiation exposure, her cataracts, a well documented ailment of her later years, are attributed to the same cause.
Curie's exposure was not confined to the laboratory. During the First World War she developed mobile radiography units, small X-ray machines mounted in vehicles that could be driven to field hospitals near the front, nicknamed petites Curies, and trained young women to operate them, the units are credited with helping treat more than a million wounded soldiers by letting surgeons locate bullets and shrapnel without moving the patient. She drove some of the units herself and received no special protective equipment for the work, at a time when the dangers of radiation exposure were only beginning to be understood.
Her legacy is still, literally, radioactive. Curie's laboratory notebooks, and even her cookbook, remain contaminated with radium at levels that will persist for another millennium and more, and they are kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in lead-lined boxes, visitors who wish to consult them must sign a waiver and wear protective clothing. Her own body was buried in a lead-lined coffin when she was reinterred at the Pantheon in Paris in 1995, the first woman honored there for her own achievements rather than as the wife of a man interred beside her.