Irène Joliot-Curie - Infinite Women

Born: 12 September 1897, France
Died: 17 March 1956
Country most active: France
Also known as: Irène Curie

The following bio was written by Emma Rosen, author of On This Day She Made History: 366 Days With Women Who Shaped the World and This Day In Human Ingenuity & Discovery: 366 Days of Scientific Milestones with Women in the Spotlight, and has been republished with permission.

Irène Joliot-Curie was a prominent French scientist and politician, the daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. In 1935, she and her husband were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on induced radioactivity, making them the second married couple to receive this honor after her parents. This added to the Curie family’s legacy of five Nobel Prizes.
Irène Joliot-Curie was also active in politics, serving as the undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front in 1936. Her children, Hélène and Pierre, also became prominent scientists.
In 1945, she played a crucial role as one of the commissioners for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), a government institution established during the leadership of Charles de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic.
Irène Joliot-Curie died in Paris on March 17, 1956, due to acute leukemia caused by her exposure to polonium and X-rays during her scientific research.

The following is republished with permission from the Science History Intitute.

Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot, a wife-and-husband team, received a Nobel Prize for their artificial creation of radioactive isotopes. With their discovery of “artificial” or “induced” radioactivity, radioactive atoms could be prepared relatively inexpensively, a boon to the progress of nuclear physics and medicine.
As a child, Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956) had the unusual experience of attending for two years a special school that emphasized science, organized by her mother, Marie Curie, and Marie’s scientific friends for their own children. Irène was still a teenager when she worked with her Nobel Prize–winning mother in the radiography corps during World War I.
After the war she assisted her mother at the Radium Institute in Paris, meanwhile completing her doctorate. She married Frédéric Joliot (1900–1958), a young physicist who had come to work with her mother.

Man-Made Radioactivity
The Joliot-Curies won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their artificial creation of new radioactive elements by bombardment of alpha particles (helium nuclei, He2+) on various light elements.
They correctly interpreted the continued positron emission that occurred after bombardment had ceased as evidence that “radioactive isotopes” of known elements had been created. Up to this point the only way to obtain radioactive elements was to painstakingly extract them from their natural ores at considerable cost.
With the Joliot-Curies’ discovery, useful radioactive isotopes were now relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, and they rapidly became important tools in biomedical research and in the treatment of cancer.
In its presentation speech the Nobel Prize Committee acknowledged, “The results of your researches are of capital importance for pure science, but in addition, physiologists, doctors, and the whole of suffering humanity hope to gain from your discoveries, remedies of inestimable value.” [1]
The Joliot-Curies were the parents of a boy and a girl, Pierre and Helene, both of whom became scientists—thus continuing a famous scientific dynasty. Irène and Frédéric died in Paris, two years apart.