History of chemistry element among the fractions that resulted. Working with the mineral pitchblende, the pair discovered a new radioactive element in 1898. They named the element polonium, after Marie's native country of Poland. On December 21, 1898, the Curies detected the presence of another radioactive material in the pitchblende. They presented this finding to the French Academy of Sciences on December 26, proposing that the new element be called radium. The Curies then went to work isolating polonium and radium from naturally occurring compounds to prove that they were new elements. In 1902, the Curies announced that they had produced a decigram
Polonium methylated in living things to create organometallic compounds. Studies investigating the metabolism of polonium-210 in rats have shown that only 0.002 to 0.009% of polonium-210 ingested is excreted as volatile polonium-210. The median lethal dose (LD) for acute radiation exposure is about 4.5 Sv. The committed effective dose equivalent Po is 0.51 µSv/Bq if ingested, and 2.5 µSv/Bq if inhaled. So a fatal 4.5 Sv dose can be caused by ingesting , about 50 nanograms (ng), or inhaling , about 10 ng. One gram of Po could thus in theory poison 20 million people of whom 10 million would die.