Marie Curie died of leukemia in July 1934. Emil Grubbe, who had been exposed to somewhat weaker X-rays, also succumbed to the deadly late effects of chronic radiation. By the mid-1940s, Grubbe’s fingers had been amputated one by one to remove necrotic and gangrenous bones, and his face was cut up in repeated operations to remove radiation-induced tumors and premalignant warts. In 1960, at the age of eighty-five, he died in Chicago, with multiple forms of cancer that had spread throughout his body.
