The year 1998 marked the 100th anniversary of Marie and Pierre Curie's investigations of radioactivity and their discovery of the radioactive elements polonium and radium. One quote attributed to Marie Curie encapsulates the brazen, and often imprudent, spirit of science and technology: "Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood." With this guiding principle, "the Curies spent countless hours bathed in a radioactive miasma, stirring vats of pitchblende in order to extract infinitesimal amounts of radium." This soon led to chronic ill-health, lesions, bone degeneration, near-blindness from cataracts, and Marie's eventual death from from either severe anemia or leukemia, medical experts surmise. The harm, however, was not limited to this one intrepid researcher. Right away, businesses started marketing radium, asserting its ‘invigorating’ health benefits including a cure for impotence, putting it in food, chocolate, and even in water. It was also used in toothpaste & cosmetics. There was even a craze for ‘radium cocktails’. The "bluish glow caught people's fancy, and companies in the United States began mining it and selling it as a novelty." Due to the delicate work, watches & clocks were painted with radium by women and they, "some as young as 15, painted about 250 dials a day for a cent and a half apiece, five and a half days a week." "Within a few years, some of the young women became horribly ill from their exposure to radium, and some died. They have become a notorious chapter in the history of occupational disease." After this episode, we have had asbestos, sun beds, and the horrible tragedies of tobacco. Can we learn something from this awful history and prevent the same kind of problems from cell phones and wireless technology? The evidence is there. We must act.