The naming of polonium was a deliberate political act. Marie Curie chose to honour Poland, then erased from the map and divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, in the hope of drawing the world's attention to her subjugated homeland; it is often described as the first element named to make a nationalist point rather than merely to record a place. The element has no ancient or alchemical tradition, being a product of the new science of radioactivity, but it gained a sinister modern notoriety in 2006, when polonium-210 was used to murder the dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London, a poisoning that made this obscure, heat-radiating element briefly world-famous. Its story runs from a scientist's patriotism to a notorious assassination.
Polonium was the first of the Curies' two new elements, announced in July 1898, five months before radium followed that December, so the deliberately patriotic name came first in a discovery sequence that would make Marie Curie, within a few short years, the most celebrated chemist of her generation and eventually a two-time Nobel laureate, in physics for the joint discovery of radioactivity and, separately, in chemistry for isolating radium and polonium themselves.