Radium, a naturally occurring element isolated from uranium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, was considered a wonder drug when the Radium Chemical Company was founded in New York in 1913.

It was handled casually; druggists sold it as an elixir for everything from arthritis and high blood pressure to depression and impotence. But radium's most widespread use was for luminous paint. It was used on everything from watch dials and instrument panels to theater-seat numbers, eyes for dolls and even fishing lures.

It was not until the early 1920's, after the first cancer deaths of watch-dial painters at the United States Radium Corporation in East Orange, N.J., that medical authorities began to realize that radium, in even the most minute amounts, was extremely dangerous and long-lasting. Workers had been instructed to twirl their paint brushes in their mouths to get a fine point. As a result, some victims ingested so much radium that their graves still cause Geiger-counter needles to jump.

Radium's usefulness in cancer therapy was recognized early in the century. A technique was developed in which tiny ''needles'' filled with radon - a radioactive gas given off by radium - were used to kill cancer cells. Radium Chemical and other companies leased the needles to hospitals and shipped them all over the country. The needles were also used in the oil industry to chart geological strata.