SCIENCE
Revealing the dark side of Curie’s ‘beautiful radium’
By Zach Clark and Kristen Anderson | Aug. 28, 2012Row upon row of women sat in a musty factory hand-painting watch dials. Each woman brought her camel-hair paintbrush to her lips, drew it into a point and carefully drew on numbers with a radiolumiescent paint. One by one these dial painters mysteriously became ill. They suffered from anemia, bone fractures and jaw necrosis, and some even died.
