After four years of stirring tons of pitchblende in a freezing shed that a visiting chemist called 'a cross between a stable and a potato cellar', Marie and Pierre Curie finally isolated a tenth of a gram of pure radium. Marie later remembered coming back at night to see the tubes glowing faintly blue-green in the dark 'like faint fairy lights'. No one yet understood the danger: Marie carried radium in her pockets and her notebooks are still radioactive today. She died in 1934 of aplastic anaemia, caused by a lifetime of radiation. The words are imagined.