Crafoord Prize

БЂњAppropriately,БЂ«notes Paul Strathern, БЂњit is an unstable element.БЂ«Radiation, of course, went on and on, literally and in ways nobody expected. In the early 1900s Pierre Curie began to experience clear signs of radiation sickness-notably dull aches in his bones and chronic feelings of malaise-which doubtless would have progressed unpleasantly. We shall never know for certain because in 1906 he was fatally run over by a carriage while crossing a Paris street. Marie Curie spent the rest of her life working with distinction in the field, helping to found the celebrated Radium Institute of the University of Paris in 1914. Despite her two Nobel Prizes, she was never elected to the Academy of Sciences, in large part because after the death of Pierre she conducted an affair with a married physicist that was sufficiently indiscreet to scandalize even the French-or at least the old men who ran the academy, which is perhaps another matter. For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial ...»