Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive and are kept in lead-lined boxes.
Curie handled radium with her bare hands and kept samples in her desk drawers, so her papers, furniture and even her cookbook absorbed radiation. Visitors to the French national library must sign a waiver to read the notebooks.
Why is this true?
Radium-226 has a half-life of about 1,600 years, so the contamination will remain for many centuries. Curie herself was buried in a lead-lined coffin; she remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
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More about famous people
Famous people accumulate stories, and only some of them are true. The entries in this category stick to documented episodes: the patents, the letters, the odd habits recorded by people who were actually there. Where a story is commonly retold in an exaggerated form, the explanation says so, which makes these facts safer to repeat than the version that usually circulates online.