00:00Marie Curie, the woman who died from what she discovered.
00:04She died more than 90 years ago, but her notebooks are still radioactive.
00:09If you want to read them today, you have to sign a liability waiver and wear protective gear.
00:14Because the radiation inside those pages will still be there for another 1,500 years.
00:20This is the story of the only woman who won two Nobel Prizes.
00:24A woman who could have been the richest person on earth.
00:27Instead, she gave it all away.
00:30And then she died from the very thing she discovered.
00:33Marie Curie was born in Poland, but women couldn't go to university there.
00:38So she studied at an underground school, worked as a governess for rich families,
00:42and saved every penny until she could afford to move to Paris.
00:46She lived in a freezing attic, surviving on bread and tea.
00:51Sometimes she fainted from hunger.
00:53But from that life of poverty, she changed the world.
00:57She and her husband Pierre worked in a leaking shed, boiling tons of uranium or over open vats,
01:02just to extract a tiny pinch of radium.
01:05Nobody knew it was poison.
01:07She kept glowing vials of radium on her nightstand.
01:10She called it, faint fairy light.
01:14She carried it in her pocket.
01:16And she wasn't alone.
01:18The whole world was in love with radium.
01:21They put it in toothpaste, makeup, even health tonics.
01:25An entire generation treated this poison like medicine.
01:29Marie was just the one standing closest to the light.
01:32She won two Nobel Prizes.
01:35But the real story isn't about medals.
01:38It's about what came next.
01:40The thing that was killing her also saved a million lives.
01:44When World War I broke out, she realized x-rays could find bullets and shrapnel inside wounded soldiers.
01:51She built mobile x-ray machines.
01:54She called them, little curies.
01:56She trained women to operate them, drove them to the front lines herself.
02:01Over a million soldiers passed through her machines.
02:04And here is where the story gets shocking.
02:07In those days, radium was the most expensive substance on earth.
02:12One grand cost about $100,000, in 1920s money.
02:16The curies were the only people in the world who knew how to extract it.
02:21They could have patented the process and become the richest family in history.
02:25They said no.
02:27Radium belongs to everyone, Marie said.
02:30To lock up a discovery for profit violates the very spirit of science.
02:34They gave the method to the world for free.
02:37A few years later, she couldn't afford radium for her own research.
02:42An American journalist started a fundraising campaign.
02:46American women donated, one dollar at a time.
02:49The president of the United States personally handed her that gram of radium.
02:53The woman who could have owned all the radium on earth had to rely on strangers to buy her one
02:58tiny vial.
02:59And the light she held so close was consuming her, inch by inch.
03:04Her hands were covered in burns and scars.
03:07Her eyesight was failing.
03:09Her blood was dying.
03:10But she never stopped working, until her body simply couldn't make new blood anymore.
03:16She died in 1934 from a plastic anemia.
03:21Radiation had destroyed her bone marrow.
03:23But here is the thing she left behind, she opened the door.
03:27Every time you get an x-ray today, every time radiation therapy treats a cancer patient, that door leads back
03:33to her.
03:34She could have locked it, charged admission, and gotten rich.
03:39Instead she kept it wide open and walked through it herself.
03:42Today her body lies in a pantheon in Paris, sealed in a lead-lined coffin an inch thick.
03:48She is still radioactive.
03:50Her notebooks are kept in a lead box at the National Library.
03:54They will outlast us all.
03:56The light she loved finally killed her.
03:59And it took her daughter Irine too, who also won a Nobel Prize, and also died from radiation-induced leukemia.
04:07Marie Curie gave away a fortune, saved millions of lives, and paid for it with her own.
04:12The question her still glowing notebooks ask, through their lead box, across 90 years is simple.
04:19If you discovered something that could save the world, but it would kill you in the process, would you still
04:24share it?
04:43Thank you very much.
05:16Thank you very much.
