Let's revisit the Curies! Marie and Pierre discovered radium and how it can kill cells. It changed the entire world of science and led to immeasurable disasters and unimagined cures. We discuss their humanity, their work, and their deaths. Post this first release, Taylor met someone who wrote their Ph.D. thesis on Radium, and they were very whelmed that Taylor knew anything about Radium because usually that's a deal breaker on a conversation. It was fun.
Let's revisit the Curies! Marie and Pierre discovered radium and how it can kill cells. It changed the entire world of science and led to immeasurable disasters and unimagined cures. We discuss their humanity, their work, and their deaths.
Post this first release, Taylor met someone who wrote their Ph.D. thesis on Radium, and they were very whelmed that Taylor knew anything about Radium because usually that's a deal breaker on a conversation. It was fun.
Hi Friends! Our transcripts aren't perfect, but I wanted to make sure you had something - if you'd like an edited transcript, I'd be happy to prioritize one for you - please email doomedtofailpod@gmail.com - Thanks! - Taylor
hello Taylor from dun to fail we are on spring break well I am I'm in Japan um
but fars has taking a break and um I am going to re-release four episodes for you this week starting with the one on
Marie and Pierre cury so I hope you enjoy this story and I also know that I
kind of mess up what radium does for cancer but I talk about it later how I fix it so whatever it's fine I know
already I got your emails um yeah hope you enjoy if you have any questions or
ideas for us give us a shout at Doom tood gmail.com thanks a matter of the
people of State of California versus orthal James Simpson case number ba09
and so my fellow Americans ask not what your country can
do for you ask what you can do for your country what's what's the coloring book
is a door the Explorer oh no it's like one these really hard ones is that like the only kids Jo you know
yes no it's just like it's one of these like really hard to color ones you know you
know like a live detail it's great that's awesome oh she did a great job on that one yeah yeah I mean she's eight
she can go there I don't know sequentially how these things work yeah
I think I asked you in Palm Springs if she was like four you asked me if mil was was like two and I was like he's six
like what are you talking about like he's walking he's he's playing baseball
he can read you're so funny he has a driver's license what are you talking about he's in college so sorry he's very
smart um okay so next week yes Ireland uh I'll edit on the Pod I'll edit on the
plane so you'll probably get it a little bit later than usual that's fine but yeah the whole family's coming over the
whole family's coming over they're going to like send me off like I'm Jack in Titanic Oh my God it's so funny are you
they're going to like drape you in an IR an Irish flag and like you over there oh it's cor it's coronation day too did you
watch did you see that this morning Co what does that mean um King Charles was
oh God who gives a [ __ ] something today but I mean but you boss me no no no but my point is that the people in Ireland
are gonna be riled up because they hate they hate them okay so do you know do you know that Ireland is actually two
countries yes okay so does everybody know that and I just learned it like this week yes
cool cool that's awesome I'm glad um well congratulations on in that thanks
um yeah no yes this Ireland and Northern Ireland there's been a lot of tension a lot of people died yeah you know what I
made I might have made some Ira jokes that that are not going to be well
received no people are still mad about that it was awful yeah they're not ready for my sense of humor then no no I would
I would I would leave that at the door when you enter Ireland yeah yeah I'm definitely definitely yeah but you can
say you can be like who cares about King Charles people would would would like
unless I'm in Northern Ireland you're not going to be in Northern Ireland so I wanted to go to Belfast and then dun was
like why like why would you want to go there's apparently nothing there but
I really just want to go see where the Titanic was launched from which I thought it would be a really fun bit of history that is cool but nobody wants to
go so I'm not going now do you remember in um Ghostbusters 2 when the when the
Titanic arrives no there's like Ghostbusters 2 when like the whole city is like full ghosts and then they go
chich and Chong are at the they're the guys at the pier and they call the police because the Titanic just arrived
and like it's like it like arrives and like it's like has a big hole in it and all these Ghosts come out of it it's very fun oh I should rewatch that um do
hey do I have like dementia you think because I don't remember anything no I mean I don't know people some people
just don't remember anything like you remember everything you remember every detail of every movie I I just have a
very weird good memory and like can't tell yourself about like math but like I know that I remember CH
Chong say that tan just arrived I don't know yeah something just because I remember on one podcast on one episode
you asked me do you remember the real world Seattle it's like what are you talking about like why that was a big it
was a cultural moment and I don't know if you watched a real world D I haven't watched a real world in 25 years but I
did watch the that one fair enough fair enough um do you have your on air sign on oh Oh shoot no I'm going to put it on
I promise miles I would hold on one second I I nailed it to my door aren't you glad I asked yeah this is the part
where we go fully silent you can't see this listeners but Taylor is doing stuff
and now she's back done I bet my voice sounded like Ira Glass just there I bet
it did it you're very calm yes um I'll take a picture I yeah I promise mil as I put it on my door's open though because
it's just me and the boy at home just in case he needs me okay so who's going
first today I think me you think you okay it doesn't really matter but I think me cool so we'll go ahead and kick
things off although we kind of been talking for a while now and it's been recording um hi everyone welcome to Doom to fail I'm fars joined here by Taylor
Pine P I already [ __ ] it up
Pino hi everyone welcome to Doom to fail I'm for just joined here by
Taylor and today we're going to bring you two more stories one historical One True Crime of relationships that were
doomed to fail how you doing tlor Taylor I'm good I'm good I'm ready you ready
yeah ready to do this thing yeah I'm ready to do this thing let's do this thing all right what you tell me what
you're drinking Ander budweis be very straightforward very simple my story takes place in Missouri and St Louis
Missouri is the home of Budweiser and and so I and also my story is very blue collar it involves very blue collar
people and I feel like Budweiser is the beer for the people you know yeah totally I get that it's not it's not all
hoyy toy doesn't call itself champagne of beer the way Miller does I think Miller fancy who do they think they are
they're monocles yeah top hat and monocles drink Miller Light out of a
champagne flute at the coronation the coronation of the king fought to secede
from people have we forgotten already yeah have we forgotten already it's just a blip in history there you go
ridiculous Patriots h no you I never want to be called a Patria but I mean
whatever you're alienating us more not I am not um I do I do not
identify that way but we whatever cool so I'll go first and we will go back in
time and we are drinking radiaor which is water infused with radium it was a
patented mix of water and radium it was manufactured in 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey radium Laboratories in New Jersey
it was like a miracle drug it would make you feel better if you were like in pain or whatever that was what it was supposed to be used for a man named eban
buers in 1927 got injured and he was prescribed by his doctor to drink rador
so the bottles are really small and he drank about about 1400 of
them before his face fell off have you heard of this guy no but the the drink
itself sounds oh wait I have kind of I think I have heard of this guy I'm gonna send you a picture of his face oh God so
this in the chat in here okay so this this is a drug or drink that was specifically created just to cause
cancer is that the idea no it was supposed to make you feel better um I
kind of like him it's terrifying his half of his face is like lit not there
like he would be really good in like a horror movie but I guess they didn't have horror movies back then no it is a
nightmare so why was he why did he drink, 1400 of them because it was supposed to make him it made him feel
better like gave him like energy at first but then it's obviously that caused all these cancer so we're not
talking about him but we're talking about radium so wait tell did you know that it eban berer is short for ebener
eban is yeah it's short for eban his name is actually Ebenezer Byer I love it
we need more ebenezers that's another one fars when you have children Ebenezer so cons
Sange wait this guy places this guy lived for 52 years yeah did he this I don't think so
I don't know so he carried on living with half a face I don't oh it's so scary I don't
know like where you put your food I don't know like anything about this oh no he did die
this right yeah yeah he died from multiple radiation induced cancers after consuming radi Thor popular patent
medicine made from radium dissolved in water and apparently he was like a really good golfer too I know I was
going to say that have such weird through lines I know I was read AIA page last night and I was like oh he's like
he could have been a famous golfer but his face fell off but least he didn't murder anybody
so okay but we're not talking about Ean talking about the mother and father of
radioactivity Marie and Pierre cury sweet let it so did you did you read
that the Google AI guy quit this week did you see that in in the newspapers I did he sounds so annoying he sounds like
one of those dweebs that you just want to Ste a stapler he he he he reminds me of of
Marie and Pierre curry in and a couple other like historical people were like
if I didn't do it someone else was going to you know like I created a monster and it was coming anyway so I I did it like
that I feel like that's kind of what that guy was saying same with like the right brothers so I read a book about the the Bri Brothers a while ago maybe
I'll talk about them in the future but they one of them died earlier but one of them lived all the way through World War
II so he saw like all of the devastation that came with knowing how to fly but
like what are the like what are the consequences what are the benefits you know like you know what I mean so I am
oh my God what's this guy's name hold on I got to find this guy real quick oh Weinstein Professor annoying yeah there
he is Brett so I went to this um this [ __ ] guy I went to this um conference
in Austin like a a couple of weeks ago and it was like this independent movement conference and so it was just
it was really interesting actually I I had a great time there but they had this panel and on the panels they would also
have like an AI so like these people would answer the questions that the moderator would pose and then the moderator say and now let's ask a what
it thinks and they would like play this audio recording of like what the AI bot
on Chad gbt thinks you know you know Brett Weinstein is no okay so he came to
prominence at Evergreen College as a professor of biology who I forgot what
he there was something he did around like racism that like really flared
people up it was probably stupid it was probably stupid but it was also like probably overreaction to it and now he's like this really popular figure in like
The Counter Culture like he's always on Joe Rogan podcast and stuff like that but he was on this panel and every time
the AI would speak he'd be like don't CLP it you're teaching it stuff stop it
this is not good it's like God you are such a bummer man like awful like just
like it's human advancement sure it's going to happen whatever just let it let
the Bots take over sorry I'm dering Your Story go ahead no but you're that's exactly right it's going to happen like you can't stop it you know you can't
stop the AI you can't stop people from learning how to fly I know I was in LA last week and there was a big billboard
for there's an an Oppenheimer movie or show coming up you know so like Oppenheimer was like I have to do this
otherwise the Nazis are going to do it you know like we have to do it first like the and it's even though like knowing that it's like technically a bad
thing you know but you have to do it first so one more one more thing M Brett
Weinstein only wears open toad sandals E I know and he's like [ __ ] 57 so it's
like yellow toes anyways go ahead I'm sorry to hear that that's disgusting you
so okay so that's the lens that we're thinking of like you know we're we're an
evolution and like what humans know during this time so for my my source is this book called radioactive it's so
good so I listened to the audio book but it's based on a graphic novel so I bought the graphic novel visual portion
look how cool it is I'll take pictures it has like cool pictures and stuff and like drawings that page is blank you
know what I mean it's cool how was that a novel cuz it's got pictures and it's a novel isn't that same thing but I think
like Frank Miller when I think of graphic novels but it's fine okay whatever um it's great and also is a movie that is it's on Amazon um called
radioactive and a Taylor Joy is in it she's in everything so whatever so also
okay so thinking about Marie and Pierre cury I tend to like get super into like
the subjects that I'm researching each week so like being thinking like Marie cury is fun because you have to be super
smart smarter than everyone and you have great posture I don't right know but she like had a great posture she was super
smart and she didn't like indulge like Oscar wild when we talked about him he was like super smart but he was like
indulgent you know he was like like muray KY would never have gotten fat she was just like studied and like wanted to
like be smarter than everyone because she was and like knew that she could be so this is basically a book report of
this book that I read this graphic novel and I also I'm like why are book reports
like in the culture bad or like annoying when I'm like if I read a book I want talk about it of course I do so I'm
excited to book report this to you well I well I think it's bad because if you force someone to read a book yes true
but if choose a book and yeah so I kind of mentioned some other uh you know
Oppenheimer we'll talk more about some of these some tragedies that came out of this the at the end of the film radioactive they have Marie cury like as
she's dying like they have her like walking through like the ruins of Chernobyl and like Hiroshima and like
things like that like they have her kind of seeing the future which is interesting so we'll recap those at the
end so Pierre Cur was older he was born on May 5 May 15 1859 in Paris his father
was a doctor encouraged him to go into science he had a degree by by the time he was 16 and started working at the
sorbon which is a school in Paris they say that like all the time so sbon Bri
was born Mar Maria Sova on November 7th 1867 in Warsaw Poland so she was the
youngest of six children in Russian controlled Poland it was very tightly controlled by the Russian government at this time when she was 16 she went to
visit family in the Carpathian Mountains and like started to like really get into science and nature I only really
mentioned that also because whenever I hear Carpathia I think of vgo from Carpathia which is also from Ghostbusters 2 yes we did not record
that part but me and T were discussing Ghostbusters earlier on before we start a recording so it's another Ghostbusters
to reference but uh yeah so you know vgo of Carpathia if you know you know so
Maria when she was still Maria she wanted to study she was really smart and she wanted to learn more the Russian like rulers didn't want Polish people
especially women to get an education they wanted to like quch like polish history culture language they don't want
anybody to learn anything they just wanted them to like you know serve Russia so she joined a secret school
called The Flying University which is called Flying because it was like in secret places and they would take like math classes and chemistry and like all
like in people's apartments and back rooms and that kind of thing um the flying University was founded in 1882
and she attended from 1891 to '92 before she got the money to to study at the
serbon in Paris and it was eventually shut down the flying University by Russia in 1905 which is probably a fun
story that maybe we can talk about later but that's pretty cool um but before she was able to go to Paris she needed to
raise some money so she took a job as a governance for a family just outside of Warsaw while she was there she fell in
love with the son of the family like he was like older and she they fell in love and his parents were like you can't
marry her she's just like a common person so he he left her and left her kind of like heartbroken so by the time
she moves to Paris she's like heartbroken and she's really intent on studying she lives in like a small like
attic room where it's always cold and she just like reads and just like learns and she got this spot at the at the cant
study out of 1,00 students that were there only 20 three were women and so
she was one of those so now she's in Paris so now both of them are in Pierre
and and Marie she changed her name from Myra to Marie to sound more French U both of them are at the sban studying
magnet magnetism they're studying like magnets are heating up medals trying to figure out if it can do different things
things like that and also I wanted to note like she does change her name to Marie but she did want to be called
scova cury professionally she always was like really attached to Poland and she could go back but it was like too
dangerous for her to be there she was in a lab that was very crowded and so someone got her space in Pierre's lab
and like I don't even know what that means like can you imagine working in a lab I mean I've taken Biology classes
where you have to be in a lab it's just like I just imagine being like Oh I need more space for my graduated cylinders like I can't I need more time with this
bunson burner yeah I mean it's like when you had to like split the Frog between you and like three other kids you know
when you dissected it or the Earth yes it's probably just like that totally oh
my God my my friend Aldi who was good friends with in high school we dissected the Frog together and I don't know like
what cologne he wore but then just from then on he smelled like dead frogs to me like he didn't but associated with the
dead frogs you know so I was just like did y all get the fetal pigs no we got
fetal pigs how was that uh I don't know if that's good for a young mind to be
exposed to it probably has my obsession with True Crime probably has something to do with having just cut up in the
guts of a fetal animal e gross and here we are here we are so pier and Maria
working together in a lab he gave her um some space in his lab they ended up you know falling in love they got married on
July 26th 1895 they honeymooned in the French Countryside and they were just super
happy they were really like happy to be working together two years later they had a daughter Irene pronounced Iran
because they're French and now they're in their lab it's and they're working together they're very happy they work
like very side by side they like write notes together like they like there's
pages of notes that have like both their handwritings on it like they're really working together like really great and
this is a really [ __ ] exciting time to be a scientist because of all these things that are happening so they didn't invent the X-ray in which I feel like is
something that I heard and like thought but they did not so in 1895 a German man named vilhelm Rotan noticed that stuff
in his lab was like making things glow and he didn't know what it was so he called it an x-ray X as an unknown so
that's what he was that's he he found it he was the first person to actually take an x-ray he took an X-ray of his wife's
hand and wait I think I have it in this book I'll show it to you um I took an X-ray of his wife's hand and when she
saw it she said I've seen my death it was the first time anybody had seen bones like that which is pretty pretty
wild that was like just a little bit over a hundred years ago I me back then they thought they taken a picture of you
was stealing your soul so I can imagine what the hell this look like for [ __ ] real like just like how scary would that
be to be like oh my God I have bones like if you think about the fact that I'm like skull that's scary I don't
think about it yeah we're just we're just bones and Bones tissue yeah I don't know if I can find it but and Reed do
look kind of cool like they look kind of badass in this picture yeah oh this is the hand that's the first x-ray ever
yeah and this is like her ring she was wearing and then like her hand God there
she proba got so much cancer after that oh 100% yeah I know she was definitely like they were like licking it after it
was done you know so meanwhile another scientist named HRI B Carl um had some
uranium like in his office like you do and he put it in a drawer with a photographic plate and like went home
for the weekend and then when he came back the photographic plate looked as if it had been exposed to light so that's when they discovered that uranium could
glow is that is that a big Discovery yes because and so what that what that did
is it inspired the curies to start studying these substances they even needed new glassware like new shapes of
glassware so she learned how to blow glass to like figure this out so they're like doing chemistry things they're
boiling things they're trying to separate these atoms what they're discovering is that the atom is not the
smallest thing so people thought that the atom was like indivisible you can't break an atom and they were finding out
that you can and you can manipulate it to make these like other elements essentially was what they discovered
Marie she was the first person to use the word radioactivity so that's so she that's what she called the process of
like changing the atom to make another element she also slept with a little bottle of like glowing radium like in
her bed because she was like constantly thinking about it they just like didn't know it was like brand new you know like
I felt like I was kind of thinking like when you were talking about like Nana being like this is music that no one's
ever heard before you know like this is a discovery that like no one knows anything about like this is brand new
which is super so so in this hypothetical is Kurt Cobain Marie Cur and Peter is Courtney Love I think so
yeah okay yeah thanks for putting in thanks for putting in analogy that I would understand you got it you got it
another fun kind of side note is that like people some people who like loved the glowing of of radium and
radioactivity were people who did sances so this was like also like a big time for like spiritualism so you know
they're like oh now I can like you know make the air glow and I can like paint the ceiling a weird thing and like make
things seem more Ghostly and like things like that so people who sances use it all the time as well and also people
were like well you can see our bones now why can't we see ghosts next you know like what's next it was like what's next
for like human science like if science can find a way to like look into our bodies can it find a way to like look
into other things because another thing that they were discovering is that like there's invisible things all around us
you know like air is full of atoms like everything is like invisible but we can still like see through it so so super exciting there was like a a a dancer who
wanted a dress made out of like all like radioactive materials when she was dancing she was like glowing and like
people loved it um it was also in like a whole bunch of stuff like the the radiaor things like that because they
didn't patent it they could have and they could have made a lot of money on it but they didn't because they were like this is like an important
scientific discovery for the world so people just kind of ran with it this kind of reminds me of your story of the
bounty where they're just like eating these like incredibly precious rare
turtles like they're nothing and here they're just like willy-nilly just throwing around uranium like it's not
like now it's probably one of the hardest substances on Earth to like get your hands on yeah and they're just like
painting the walls with it exactly they're like rolling around of their hands being like this is cool you
know not good they also discovered they discovered radium first um and then they
discovered polonium which is another another radioactive thing and she named it polonium after Poland after her her
home country people just loved it and it was everywhere in 1900 Pierre I don't
know as an experiment put some radium in like a little jar and he tied it to his arm to see what would happen like what
would happen if I kept it this close to me for like a certain a long period of time so after 40 days it did start to
like create like a big open wound on his arm and so he so that was like a big
Discovery because it could destroy tissue so could it destroy disease tissue and
basically this is the only thing that we have that's a good cure for cancer is really yeah in in Fr wait that's what
chemotherapy is is like uranium poisoning yeah they it's it's radiation yeah it's radiation killing your cells
um and hopefully killing the bad ones and what it does is it fundamentally changes the DNA of the cells to make
sure it doesn't so it either doesn't so it doesn't reproduce or it's too damaged to like to continue to live and that's
what it that's what it is in France they call chemotherapy cury therapy oh wow okay yeah so essentially like that's
that's the big thing yeah yeah it cures cancer yeah so I mean it's 123 years
later it's like that's like the best we can do still also in 1903 Pierre and Marie won the Nobel Prize she was the
first women to to to win it the prize that the Nobel Prize you know still exists today you know it was created by
Alfred Nobel he's the person person who invented dynamite and with all of his Dynamite money he created this like
prize there's a whole bunch of different you know categories that you can win one in when you win you get a gold medal a
circle gold medal a diploma and you get about a million dollars it's pretty sweet yeah when you win all that
Dynamite money all that Dynamite money so Pierre went to Sweden alone to accept the award kind of because she was a
woman and men are awful and they like wanted to give it to her but they didn't really want to like see her getting it and also because she wasn't feeling well
like she was starting to get sick and so was everybody like everybody's finally starting to get sick Pierre was
especially sick and he was in a lot of pain he was like coughing up blood um Pier's the one who like strapped it to
his body for 40 days right yeah yeah so he's super sick and they're like uh oh
like this thing that we invented or discover that we thought was amazing is like making people sick and now they're starting to see it so actually so they
get The Nobel Prize in 1903 in 1906 Pierre was walking alone at night in
Paris and um he may have been sick he may have made a wrong turn like whatever
but he got hit by a carriage the horses like kind of trampled him a little bit but then the wheels of the carriage
split his head open and he died so he died with his brains all over the street
just not not not pretty Taylor where does uranium come from is it created
through other elements or do you just like mine for it and you find it in the earth I think that you have to like
had to like distill it in in some way right so Marie was devastated she had two kids at this point Pierre is gone so
she was given Pierre's professor professorship at the sarbon which is Bittersweet um because uh you know it
was exciting that she was able to to get that job so he was a professor there she was a first woman she's actually also
the first woman in France to get a PhD and so she was now a professor four
years later after Pierre's death Marie began an affair with a former student of Pier named Paul lovan Paul lovan was
married so that was the bad thing when they like had their had their Affair and his wife was really pissed like fair but
she um in the movie is played by the woman who plays Jen barber in the IT Crowd she's like hard to take seriously because she's so funny in the IT Crowd
but um so she was like going to make it public she's going to publish their
letters she's going to tell everybody she like wanted a divorce she was just like so mad about this Paul himself was
super smart in the 1940s he would be arrested by the Nazis for being in the French Resistance so um he's super cool
Einstein literally Einstein wrote that Paul would have been the guy to discover Rel uh the theory of relativity if he
would have had more time like Einstein was a little a little bit older than or younger than him so he was able to do it but Einstein was like this guy's as
smart as me this this is like real smart people so like Paula Marie and Pierre smartest people people start to get mad
at at Marie for having this affair because starts to get public they start calling her names like an immigrant and
like you know calling her a Jew as like an insult when she wasn't she was Catholic but like people just like
wanted her out of France because of this which is really weird because you're like who cares you know she's one of the
smartest people wouldn't you like yeah wouldn't you take pride in having I mean yeah like she's ridiculously smart like
get over it and then speaking of Einstein while she was in the middle of this Einstein wrote her a letter that
was like oh don't worry you know your personal life is isn't you like whatever who cares about your personal life and
then they also noted in this book that Einstein also had just had like a child with one of his students and then also
he ended up marrying his cousin which I didn't know yeah I remember he married his cousin I remember that point so lots
of cousin cousin lover people were hard to find back then there so people I
guess Paul's wife you know wanted to uh break them up there were duels between
there's a duel between Paul and a reporter that involved guns but they didn't shoot they were like this silly like let's not shoot so all this crazy
stuff is happening in her personal life in the middle of it Marie wins a second Nobel Prize so she's not only the first
woman to win a Nobel Prize she's the first person to win won twice this time she won for chemistry Sweden asked her
not to come to the ceremony because of this affair and this like scandal in the paper and she said quote there's no
connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life so she's like [ __ ] You I'm super smart I'm
coming so she went to Sweden and accepted her second Nobel Prize um
brought them to the battlefield battlefields of World War I they made uh 18 mobile x-rays so they put them in
like an an ambulance and 200 non-mobile ones and just saved countless lives because they were like this guy's hand
is broken he needs a sling he doesn't need to have his arm cut off right so saved a ton of people also going back to
Paul just I think one more thing about him he created the first submarine detector so he essentially created sonar
so they did a lot of help like during the wars as well during both both world wars so after this Marie uh you know
developed an Institute the Cur Institute in Paris where people could study she went to the US she met with President
Harding she like traveled around the world talking about what she had learned but her her health was failing obviously
she could barely see she could barely walk she passed away on July 4th 1934 of various radiation poisonings that led to
like anemia makes sense aren and her husband also you know they won that
Nobel Prize but they also had had some health problems because of all of the radiation they had a daughter named
Helena and Helena in 1948 married Paul's grandson so Marie and Paul their
grandchildren got married which is lovely yeah that's cute because they were really they were happy too so Marie
and Pierre are both interned in the pantheon in Paris their bodies were moved there in 1995 they were in a
cemetery and they got moved there their bodies and their work are still super radioactive their coffins are lined with
lead and if you wanted to actually look at their like not notebooks you have to like wear a hazmat suit and you can't
touch it with the way that half with the way that radium works like the halflife so like halflife is like and this time
it'll be half and then it gets like faster and faster the her body will be half as radioactive as it is right now
in 1500 years so she's going to be ractive for like a really long time but how old was she when she died like
64 I mean that's she lived like a I mean for that time that's probably like a normal lifespan right yeah I think so
too all things considered yeah just juggling with the most toxic chemic
substances in the world yeah like literally holding it that's their that's their story you no matter what happened
you know from their discoveries like Maria clofa AKA Marie K she was
obviously a Pioneer for women in science she broke down glass ceilings or even heard about glass ceilings but I do want
to talk about some of the bad things like some of the kind of crazy things that happened you know from these discoveries so in the 19 20s also in New
Jersey I don't know if you've heard the story but there was a watch Factory called the US radium Corporation and
they would make those watches to make the hands glow um which is great and the way they would do that is they would
paint the hands with radioactive paint and it was such a fine line they needed
to paint that the women who did it would just like lick the brushes so their faces also fell off yeah about 800 women
would were working there many of them died of cancer most of them and then many of them had like huge problems with
their face like their whole face like decaying they won a landmark case um for
workers rights in 1928 but many of them were already dead by that time yeah I remember the story yeah also obviously
like the nuclear bombs you know those that technology came from this we know about you know the Manhattan Project
physicist in the Manhattan Project named Irving s loen he defied orders to keep it tap secret so it was a total secret
like the president didn't even know about it and to tie back to another episode he talked to Elanor Roosevelt
because no one would listen to him this scientist from the Manhattan Project Irving loen talked to ER she talked to
FDR and was like they need more money because if they don't do this the Nazis are going to do it first so like that
that is the absolute worst case scenario is if the Nazis get a nuclear bomb you know so we have to do work it faster so
they got more money but Irving loen was fired and never like got any like
recognition for being the person that like actually got it over over the thing obviously we the US got it First on
August 6th 1945 at 8:15 in the morning the United States bombed the city of heima Japan the stories are unbelievable
the destruction and the confusion um Everybody holding their skin in the movie they do a great scene where it's
like they're in Japan and there's like kids running in the streets and like all these beautiful signs and like all this
stuff and then someone looks up and just like sees it coming and they just like get destroyed in this picture in this book that I have I'll take a picture of
this too there there's like this this paper cut out of someone like a black figure of a body and this Japanese woman
had cut it out as like an art project cuz she when she found her father after the bomb he was totally black his skin
was totally black and when she touched him the skin came off and she saw his muscles that's how burned you know PE
and people were just like carrying their skin and then obviously tons of people more people died because of radiation afterwards so unbelievable in the 1950s
they were still doing nuclear tests in Nevada around all these like fake towns where they would like fill the houses
with like you know mannequins from JC Penney and we've all we've all seen The Hills Have Eyes yes exactly so like that
and it was that there also a new Wes Anderson movie that they're in one of
those towns too that's coming out I think soon so that will be fine so every but everyone who lived around those towns has cancer you know sense it's
just obviously one of my favorite stories is I'm looking this up now was
Oppenheimer getting meeting with President Truman MH and just being like
this is the worst thing in the world I have blood on my hands this this and the other thing and I'm reading this quote
from Wikipedia where it says the remark infuriate infuriated Truman who and who
put an end to the meeting Truman later told his under secretary I don't want to see that son of a [ __ ] in my office
ever again so he like really pissed Truman off by being all whiny about like the bomb he was like yeah I got to make
the decision and whatever you can feel however you want to feel about it yeah [ __ ] that's that's a but I also heard
that mostly what the reason why America did that to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was
actually mostly to deter Russia or the USSR it actually had nothing to do with like trying to save like American lives
or end the war quickly it had more to do with like we need them to know that we we are serious yeah I mean someone had
to do it first you know did they did they have to yes and I think that's that
that's that's the part of like all these bad things like you know creating the AI That's going to destroy the world like
someone's going to do it it's happening you know there's no way to stop it yeah
there's also been some nuclear uh reactor disasters in 1979 3 Mile Island in Pennsylvania people there all have
cancer everyone is dead or dying um also in the 80s obviously the inter Chernobyl
exploded uh has great there's a great Series in HBO about Chernobyl but in both those cases it's like a great
series of like small failures that led to a huge failure you know like one person was late one person like spilled
their coffee on the board one person like didn't read one rule like whatever and it just like compounded into something really really terrible a lot
of people died there as well 2006 I don't know if you remember this but a Russian spy named Alexander the dentco
was killed by ponum yeah like stabbed him like they just like punctured him
with something maybe like an umbrella I forgot what it was but yeah yeah and he had like a quick like a I don't know if
it was quick but he like you know died of radiation poisoning like pretty pretty Plum is like impossible to get
too so it was like definitely a rush who did it to him all that so the good things that you know came from this
obviously like they proved that atoms had particles so that's like what you learn in elementary school they were the first nuclear physicists they are the
closest thing to a cure cancer they their work created radiation detectors to like help detect radiation like
that's like in nature and then understanding like the halflife of radium and of different elements can
help you understand how old the world is so just like obviously an incredible contribution to science um the next step
is like literally anything like the only way we're going to go to space is with nuclear power so you know if we want to
you know travel the universe we need it and there are in space right now there are asteroids and craters on planets
named after the curies because like everyone knows it that that they are they are the people who are going to
make that possible the the way that we get there so yeah it could be anything that comes next with that but it comes
from the infinite power of the atom and the CU has discovered it it's very cool
yeah good for them yeah what a what a terrible way to go just slowly poisoning
yourself with radiation yeah like everything you have is poison yeah there there was um did
you when you said the New Jersey story I thought you were going to talk about that guy who built an atomic he bu he
built like an atom bomb or like a a nuclear reactor in his in his like shed
did you hear that story no the guy looks the guy looks like he's melting oh my
God I built radio nuclear man I don't
know nuclear man DC no nuclear man built reactor in shed
I mean once you start googling nuclear stuff I'm just like oh God nuclear boy
yeah there he is David Han that's it yeah so he um they called him sometimes
called the radioactive Boy Scout or the nuclear Boy Scout he was a radiation
Enthusiast and he built a neutron Source at the age of 17 FBI and then the FBI
learned he was doing this whoa he died in he should not have that stuff Yeah
Boy Scout 17 made an his entire neighborhood radioactive after building a nuclear reactor in his mom's Garden
yeah yep people shouldn't have that power yeah wild wow okay wild cool story
tayer thanks I am gonna transition over to