Radium seventh of a gram of radium. One kilogram of the Earth's crust contains about 900 picograms of radium, and one liter of sea water contains about 89 femtograms of radium. Radium was discovered by Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre Curie on 21 December 1898, in a uraninite (pitchblende) sample. While studying the mineral earlier, the Curies removed uranium from it and found that the remaining material was still radioactive. They separated out an element similar to bismuth from pitchblende in July 1898, that turned out to be polonium. They then separated out a radioactive mixture consisting mostly of two
Radium-223 years) in turn decays via thorium-227 (half-life 18.7 days) to radium-223. This decay path makes it convenient to prepare radium-223 by "milking" it from an actinium-227 containing generator or "cow", similar to the moly cows widely used to prepare the medically important isotope technetium-99m. The pharmaceutical product and medical use of radium-223 against skeletal metastases was invented by Roy H. Larsen, Gjermund Henriksen and Øyvind S. Bruland and has been developed by the former Norwegian company Algeta ASA, in a partnership with Bayer, under the trade name Xofigo (formerly Alpharadin), and is distributed as a solution containing radium-223 chloride (1100