What are the names of several people who have worked with radioactive decay?
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Henri Becquerel. \n\nGlenn T. Seaborg. \n\nMarie and Pierre Curie\n\nEnrico Fermi\n\nIrene Joliot-Curie\n\nFrederik Joliot\n\nErnest Rutherford\n\nHarold Urey\n\nand literally thousands and thousands more.
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Radioactive decay is the set of various processes by which unstable atomic nuclei emit subatomic particles (radiation). Decay is said to occur in the parent nucleus and produces a daughter nucleus. This is a random process, i.e. it is impossible to predict the decay of individual atoms.
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Not sure you can get an exact ranking, because three were researched simultaneously:\n\nHelium was discovered on Earth in 1895 by Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay, though some credit the discovery of helium (in the sun's spectrum) to Janssen and Lockyear in 1868. Ramsay discovered most of the remaining noble gases--argon in 1894 (with Lord Rayleigh) and krypton, neon, and xenon in 1898 (with Morris M. Travers). Radon was discovered in 1898 by Fredrich Ernst Dorn.
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radioactivity is the decay of an atom by emmision of radiation. Biotechnology is the use of biology to improve something, be it health or living conditions etc.
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Radium and polonium are primarily alpha emitters (an alpha particle is essentially the nucleus of a HELIUM atom, without electrons), as the previous poster noted. But they also emit gamma radiations, and many of the isotopes are beta emitters. There are even a few cases where they emit positrons (for example, Polonium 186).
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The rate of radiation is determined by the isotopes involved.  No matter what elements, no matter what method of decay, only two things can lessen the effects of radiation.  One is shielding.  This is easier with alpha particles than with gamma rays.  The other is distance.  By doubling the distance from the radiation source, the amount of radiation is reduced to one fourth.\nWith time any specimen will have fewer atoms which are radioactive.  Eventually all radioactive specimens stop radiating (but this might take tens of hours or billions of years)
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Many persons did, the most known of them being Francisco Redi \n(1668), Lazzaro Spallanzani, and Louis Pasteur (1859).\n\nHave a look to this interesting, short historical review:\n"The Slow Death of Spontaneous Generation (1668-1859)"\nhttp://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Spontaneous_Generation.html
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In standard model physics, we have 6 quarks, 3 leptons each with their associated neutrinos, 4 known gauge bosons; for the electromagnetic field (photon)and the weak interaction(W and Z bosons) that causes radioactive decay, and the strong force (gluon HA HA!).  They also have theorized that there is a particle called the Higgs boson and they are not completely sure what that does.  There also can be an almost infinite amount of created particles each with a different rest energy.
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Links below have history of the development of radioactivity:\n\nIsotopes in Research and Medicine\n\nScientists can now create radioactive forms of common elements, called isotopes. Each isotope has a fixed rate of decay which can be characterized by its half-life, or the length of time that it takes half of the radioactive atoms in a sample to decay. Because each isotope decays at a unique and predictable rate, different isotopes can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, isotopes play an important role in modern medicine. They can be ingested and traced in their path through the body, revealing biochemical and metabolic processes with precision. These isotropic "tracers" are currently used for practical diagnosis of disease as well as in research.
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do you mean apart from radiation and dead people?
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In statistics it's called the law of large numbers.  Yes, every particle  is radioactive, and yes, at any moment they all could decay.  However, with a large enough sample (10^23 atoms) only a average number will decay at any one time.  This is actually extremely accurate and predicatable.  As with the law of large numbers, the accuracy will deteorate if the sample gets too small (ie, only 1 or 2 atoms left).  In that case, those atoms could decay at the predicted rate, all at once, or never at all! But the key is, there's alway lots of atoms.\n\nYou used the word random.  And that's a great example.  For a few trials (a small number of atoms) a coin can come up all heads, or all tails.  But if you flip it 10^23 times, you bet you'll get a 50/50 ratio, even though each individual event is random.
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Which isotope?\n\nThorium-232 has a half-life of 14 billion (14x109) years, and decays by alpha emission, with accompanying gamma radiation. Thorium-232 is the top of a long decay series that contains key radionuclides such as radium-228, its direct decay product, and radon-220. \n\nTwo other isotopes of thorium, which can be significant in the environment, are thorium-230 and thorium-228. Both belong to other decay series. They also decay by alpha emission, with accompanying gamma radiation, and have half-lives of 75,400 years and 1.9 years, respectively
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Among the numerous and valuable writings of the Curies are Marie Curie's doctoral dissertation, Radioactive Substances (1902, 2 vol.; tr. 1961); Traité de radioactivité (1910); Radioactivité (1935); and her biography of Pierre Curie (1923, tr. 1923). Pierre Curie's collected works appeared in 1908. A biography of Marie Curie was written by a daughter, Ève Curie (tr. 1937). See also biographies by R. W. Reid (1974), F. Giroud (tr. 1986), S. Quinn (1995), and B. Goldsmith (2004).
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Radioactivity was first discovered in 1896 by the French scientist Henri Becquerel while working on phosphorescent materials. These materials glow in the dark after exposure to light, and he thought that the glow produced in cathode ray tubes by X-rays might somehow be connected with phosphorescence. So he tried wrapping a photographic plate in black paper and placing various phosphorescent minerals on it. All results were negative until he tried using uranium salts. The result with these compounds was a deep blackening of the plate.\n\nHowever, it soon became clear that the blackening of the plate had nothing to do with phosphorescence because the plate blackened when the mineral was kept in the dark. Also non-phosphorescent salts of uranium and even metallic uranium blackened the plate. Clearly there was some new form of radiation that could pass through paper that was causing the plate to blacken.\n\nAt first it seemed that the new radiation was similar to the then recently discovered X-rays. However further research by Becquerel, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, Ernest Rutherford and others discovered that radioactivity was significantly more complicated. Different types of decay can occur.\n\nFor instance, it was found that an electric or magnetic field could split such emissions into three beams. For lack of better terms, the rays were given the alphabetic names alpha, beta, and gamma, names they still hold today. It was immediately obvious from the direction of electromagnetic forces that alpha rays carried a positive charge, beta rays carried a negative charge, and gamma rays were neutral. From the magnitude of deflection, it was also clear that alpha particles were much more massive than beta particles. Passing alpha rays through a thin glass membrane and trapping them in a discharge tube allowed researchers to study the emission spectrum of the resulting gas, and ultimately prove that alpha particles are in fact helium nuclei. Other experiments showed the similarity between beta radiation and cathode rays; they are both streams of electrons, and between gamma radiation and X-rays.\n\nThese researchers also discovered that many other chemical elements have radioactive isotopes. Radioactivity also guided Marie Curie to isolate radium from barium; the two elements' chemical similarity would otherwise have made them difficult to distinguish.\n\nThe dangers of radioactivity and of radiation were not immediately recognized. Acute effects of radiation were first observed in the use of X-rays when an Serbo-Croatian-American electric engineer Nikola Tesla intentionally subjected his fingers to X-rays in 1896. He published his observations concerning the burns that developed, though he attributed them to ozone rather than to the X-rays. Fortunately his injuries healed later.\n\nThe genetic effects of radiation, including the effects on cancer risk, were recognized much later. It was only in 1927 that Hermann Joseph Muller published his research that showed the genetic effects. In 1947 he was awarded the Nobel prize for his findings.\n\nBefore the biological effects of radiation were known, many physicians and corporations had begun marketing radioactive substances as patent medicine and Radioactive quackery; particularly alarming examples were radium enema treatments, and radium-containing waters to be drunk as tonics. Marie Curie spoke out against this sort of treatment, warning that the effects of radiation on the human body were not well understood (Curie later died from aplastic anemia assumed due to her own work with radium, but later examination of her bones showed that she had been a careful laboratory worker and had a low burden of radium; a better candidate for her disease was her long exposure to unshielded X-ray tubes while a volunteer medical worker in WW I). By the 1930's, after a number of cases of bone-necrosis and death in enthusiasts, radium-containing medical products had all but vanished from the market.\n
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Someone working with helium is not being exposed to any more Alpha radiation than someone who doesn't work with helium.  It is when someone is working with something with a much higher atomic weight that they get exposed to the radiation from the decay of the larger nucleus into smaller particles that include the Alpha particle.
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Lisa Meitner. She is recently credited for first explaining certain experimental results that turned out to be the first proof of theorized nuclear fission. She received the Fermi award for her role in creating the first atomic bomb.
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plutonium. neptunium, mercury ,uranium