madame curie said in 1903 that he would not dare to leave himself alone in a room with a kilo of peer radium because it would burn all the skin off his body and destroy his eyesight and probably kill them. part of the shocking thing of the story of the radium girls is that literally next door to the dial feeding studio where the women were sucking on their brushes and swallowing the paint you have the male lab workers dressed in lead aprons in wielding ivory -tipped tongues because they thought radium was dangerous for them. women at the forefront of technology they didn't realize it at the time and again, it's a story of ordinary women who did extra ordinary things because radioactivity is not safe and it will not add years to your life and it will shorten it drastically. and yet because these girls and resulting years did not they bought for justice and brought it to the public knowledge that obviously protected millions of people and the people read the book or you will read it you'll see the stories that it does not it's not just world war i but goes into world war ii because then