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So radium was the element that was discovered by Madam Curie and its chemistry is very similar
to that of barium, except that it is radioactive and it was used quite widely for treatment
of cancer in the days when radiation was used, radioactivity was used, for treating Cancer.
The idea is that cancer cells, well all cells are liable to be killed by radiation, by radioactivity
when they are dividing so cancer cells are cells in the body which are dividing much
faster, out-of-control compared to other cells, so if you radiate a patient, the cancer cells,
because they are dividing faster, die quicker, so overall although a lot of cells die, the
Cancer cells die further. The people, who discovered radium, were really excited about
it and they were mad with hindsight in the way they treated it. They carried sort of
little glass tubes of radium in their pockets and were then surprised when they found burns
on their flesh the next day and it’s thought that the reason why many of these researchers
like Madam Curie’s husband and Madam Curie died rather young was the effect of the radioactivity
of the elements that they handled.
Well in general as you go down the periodic table, heavier elements tend to be more dangerous.
But even the very reactive ones like fluorine are usually not very dangerous because they
react with something long before they get into the body. The radioactive elements tend
to be dangerous because they can get into the body and then when they decay, they kill
cells or even worse than killing the cells is that they change the DNA so that the cells
mutate into some more aggressive form of cancer.