Frédéric Joliot-Curie

Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900-1958), French nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize winner. Joliot-Curie is widely credited with bringing his country into the atomic age, first with his research into and discovery of artificially induced radioactivity, and later with his appointment as director of France's Atomic Energy Commission, modeled at his direction on that of the United States. Joliot-Curie shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry with his wife, French physicist Irène Joliot-Curie for their work on artificial radiation.

Frédéric Joliot-Curie was born Jean-Frédéric Joliot in Paris. In 1920 he was admitted to that city's prestigious École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle, from which he graduated first in his class and went on to accept a research position at the Radium Institute at the University of Paris. There the scientist met Irène Curie, daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, the famous Nobel Prize winners who discovered radium; when Frédéric and Irène married in 1926, they both adopted the surname Joliot-Curie.

The work of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie led to the eventual developments of nuclear fission, nuclear energy, and the atomic bomb. While at the Radium Institute, Frédéric began studying radioactivity by working with the cloud chamber, a device that shows an atom's charged particles in the form of a water-droplet trail. He completed his doctoral thesis, a study of the electrochemistry of radioactive elements, in 1930. Shortly thereafter, he and Irène began studying the work of German physicists Walther Bothe and Hans Becker. Bothe and Becker's experiments centered around the radiation emitted when certain lighter elements are bombarded with alpha rays (energy particles that resemble the nucleus of a helium atom and contain two positive charges). The Joliot-Curies' research eventually led to the discovery of the first artificial isotope, and then to artificial radioactivity.

A staunch supporter of the French Resistance movement to Germany's occupation of Paris during World War II (1939-1945), Joliot-Curie joined the Communist Party and went underground in Paris to protect his life and those of his wife and children. When the war ended, Joliot-Curie persuaded French President Charles de Gaulle to set up an Atomic Energy Commission. As its commissioner, Joliot-Curie supervised the creation of a major nuclear-research center. But as post-World War II Cold War politics and tensions escalated, the French government relieved Joliot-Curie, still a member of the Communist Party, of his duties—a move that was both professionally and personally devastating. Joliot-Curie's wife Irène eventually died of leukemia; upon her death, he became head of the Radium Institute. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Frédéric Joliot-Curie received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951.