My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium. And It Killed Her.
By VERONIQUE GREENWOOD DEC. 3, 2014

Curie was doomed via the daily fractional crystallizations to separate out Polonium, then Radium, way back in 1898.. nobody knew the lethal mechanisms; but 40 years later?
Hard to get head around: these events ~1938, given the state of physics knowledge by then.. necessary for PhD chemists, too.. Meitner and Otto Hahn discovered protactinium in 1917; its huge ionizing radiation was a known Hazard, even with the minuscule lore and few decent instruments (gold-leaf electrometers?)
Re. physics lore then, per Wikipedia

In their second publication on the evidence of barium (Die Naturwissenschaften, 10 February 1939) Hahn and Strassmann used for the first time the name Uranspaltung (Uranium fission) and predicted the existence and liberation of additional neutrons during the fission process (which was proved later to be a chain reaction by Frédéric Joliot and his team). Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch were the first who correctly interpreted Hahn's and Strassmann's results as being nuclear fission, a term coined by Frisch, and published their paper in Nature.[29] Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.[30]

This from a new author for NYT Magazine delving into the rank-obliviousness over decades, influenced (probably most?) via Curie's simple disdain for FACTS du jour. How unscientific, that.
I don't get it. From 'here'. :-/

Could chemists then have been so ignorant, just conceptually, of the phrase, "effects of ionizing radiation on living things?" They bloody-well Had to know about all sorts of physics matters-about-'Matter', even to do decent chemistry. There had been by then, many notable highly-educated dead-deteriorated bodies: names known (or even personal acquaintance.)
Maybe this-all was just the Formal-proof? that, Knowing is not enough.

There was no "Chart of the Nuclides" then, and they seem to have thought: The Periodic Chart is Your Friend.
..more like Fiend, Y.P.B.

Add-to-list.

Loved this quip:

Here is what “The Disappearing Spoon” does not do: really unpack how the periodic table works. Nor does it provide clear and consistent illumination about, say, what electrons do in s-shells versus what they do in p-shells, let alone in the more daunting d-shell configuration. Inevitably some of what he discusses will be out of reach for the lay reader. And Mr. Kean does not have the teacherly patience of Brian Greene, a science writer who can make string theory sound like child’s play.

(Know Al Ghiorso.. hadn't thought Theodore Roosevelt, but maybe.. We used his heavy-ion Linac as injector to the Bevatron.. never envisioned when/where both were built. Sci-fact beats Sci-fi.

;^> Sounds like a hoot ... (But I Want d-shell configuration Made SImple!)