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 Prof. Nick Priest of Middlesex University, an environmental toxicologist and radiation expert, speaking on Sky News on December 3, 2006, Litvinenko was probably the first person to die of the acute α-radiation effects of Po. Abnormally high concentrations of Po were detected in July 2012 in clothes and personal belongings of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a heavy smoker, who died on 11 November 2004 of uncertain causes. The spokesman for the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, where those items were analyzed, stressed that the "clinical symptoms described in Arafat's medical reports were not consistent with polonium-210 and that