As the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, two of the world’s most famous scientists, Irène Joliot-Curie went on to have her own spectacular scientific career. Along with her husband Frédéric, she discovered the first-ever artificially created radioactive atoms, which paved the way for a myriad of medical advances, especially in the fight against cancer.
The pair went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, making them the second-ever married couple, after her parents, to win the Nobel Prize. This brought the Curie family legacy to five Nobel Prizes, and made them the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.
Irène Curie was born on September 12, 1897, in Paris, France. Unsatisfied with the quality of education at the schools near her family’s home, Marie Curie teamed up with several of her scholarly colleagues to form “The Cooperative” for her daughter and nine other children. Irène was taught physics by her mother, chemistry by Jean Baptiste Perrin, mathematics by the physicist Paul Langevin, and was soon as passionate about science as her parents.
During World War I, at age 17, Irène took a nursing class in order to assist her mother. She was soon teaching radiology to nurses and taking X-rays in battlefield hospitals, often repairing the equipment on her own. She received a military medal for her assistance in X-ray facilities in France and Belgium.
After the war, Irène prepared for her baccalauréat at the Collège Sévigné, and in 1918 became her mother’s assistant at the Institut du Radium of the University of Paris. Irène became a Doctor of Science in 1925 after presenting her thesis on the alpha rays of polonium. That same year, she met Frédéric Joliot in one of her mother’s laboratories and they married in 1926. By 1928, they were signing all their research jointly.
After a few more minor discoveries, the Joliot-Curies secured their spots in scientific history with research they conducted in 1934. Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the synthesis of new radioactive isotopes the following year. Irène went on to become the Director of the Radium Institute in 1946 and was a member of several foreign academies and numerous scientific societies. She died in Paris in 1956 from leukemia, most likely due to radiation from polonium-210.