Marie Curie them on visits to Poland. She named the first chemical element that she discovered in 1898 "polonium", after her native country. Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, at a sanatorium in Sancellemoz (Haute-Savoie), France, of aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research and in the course of her radiological work at field hospitals during World War I. Maria Skłodowska was born in Warsaw, in Congress Poland in the Russian Empire, on 7 November 1867, the fifth and youngest child of well-known teachers Bronisława, "née" Boguska, and Władysław Skłodowski. The elder siblings of Maria
Marie Curie and Pierre: the curie. Nevertheless, in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences failed, by one or two votes, to elect her to membership in the Academy. Elected instead was Édouard Branly, an inventor who had helped Guglielmo Marconi develop the wireless telegraph. It was only over half a century later, in 1962, that a doctoral student of Curie's, Marguerite Perey, became the first woman elected to membership in the Academy. Despite Curie's fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude tended toward xenophobia—the same that had led to the Dreyfus affair—which also fueled false speculation that Curie was