Musée Curie

The Musée Curie occupies the very laboratory where Marie Curie conducted her groundbreaking research on radioactivity. A plain, yellow-brick building tucked away on the Rue Pierre et Marie Curie, it preserves the chemist’s original workspace, including her heavy lead-lined benches and the equipment she used to isolate polonium and radium. In nineteen thirty-four, scientists discovered that the ground around the laboratory had become radioactive from years of handling open isotopes, leading to a long process of decontamination.