Irène Joliot-Curie

Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956), French physicist and Nobel laureate. She and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie shared the 1935 Nobel Prize for chemistry for their work in the synthesis of radioactive substances.

Irène Curie was born in Paris, the daughter of the French physicists and Nobel Prize winners Marie and Pierre Curie. She graduated from the College Sevigne in Gagny, France, in 1914 and began her graduate education at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). Her graduate education was interrupted by World War I (1914-1917). In 1918 she resumed her education at the University of Paris, and received her Ph.D. degree in 1925 for her work on alpha particles (positively charged nuclear particles consisting of two protons bound to two neutrinos). Also in 1918 she began assisting her mother at the Radium Institute where she met Frédéric Joliot, whom she married in 1926. They subsequently worked together as a scientific team, and both assumed the name of Joliot-Curie.

The Joliot-Curies specialized in the field of nuclear physics. In 1933, inspired by the research of German physicist Walther Bothe, they made the important discovery that radioactive elements can be artificially prepared from stable elements. In separate experiments they bombarded aluminum foil and boron with alpha particles, temporarily changing the aluminum into radioactive phosphorus and producing a radioactive form of nitrogen from the boron. This was the first instance of creating artificial radioactivity.

In 1936 Joliot-Curie became a full professor at the University of Paris after lecturing there since 1932, and also served in the French cabinet as undersecretary of state for scientific research. She was a member of the French Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1951 and director of the Institute of Radium after 1947. She became an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1939 and received many other honors for her contributions to nuclear science. Her death, on March 17, 1956, was caused by leukemia, which she contracted in the course of her work.