1. Marie Curie
Marie Sklodowska Curie was a French-Polish chemist and physicist, known for her role in discovering basic concepts of radioactivity. She worked in a shed, without proper safety measures and regularly put test tubes filed with radioactive isotopes into her pockets. Curie may also be exposed when she operated unshielded x-ray equipments during the First World War to diagnose war casualties. Her papers and books were found to be highly radioactive, and currently stored inside lead-lined boxes. The long-term exposure of radiation caused aplastic anemia and she died in 1934.