Irène Joliot-Curie (; ; 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French chemist and physicist who received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, for their discovery of induced radioactivity. The couple also discovered positron emission during their research. They were the second married couple, after her parents, to win the Nobel Prize, adding to the Curie family's legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date.
She and her mother Marie Skłodowska-Curie form the only mother–daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes. Furthermore, Pierre and Irène Curie form the only father-daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes, compared to six father-son pairs who have won Nobel Prizes.
She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for scientific research under the Popular Front in 1936.Archives de l'état civil de Paris en ligne, acte de naissance no 13/2073/1897, avec mention marginale du décès. Autre mention : mariage en 1926 avec Jean Frédéric Joliot (consulté le 8 avril 2012) Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also scientists.
In 1945, she was one of the six commissioners of the new French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) created by de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic. She died in Paris on 17 March 1956 from acute leukemia linked to her exposure to polonium and X-rays.
Biography Early life and education Irène Curie was born in Paris, France, on 12 September 1897. She was the first of Marie and Pierre's two daughters. Her sister Ève was born in 1904. They lost their father in April 1906 due to a horse-drawn wagon incident, and Marie was left to raise them with the help of her father-in-law, Eugene Curie, who had played an active role in their lives since the girls were born. Irène had a close relationship with her grandfather until his death in 1910.
Education was important to Marie and Irène's education began at a school near the Paris Observatory. This school was chosen because it had a more challenging curriculum than the school nearby the Curie's home. In 1906, it was obvious Irène was talented in mathematics. Her mother chose to focus on that instead of public school. Marie joined forces with a number of eminent French scholars, including prominent French physicists Paul Langevin and Jean Perrin, to form "The Cooperative", which was a private gathering of ten students — Irène included — who were children of the most distinguished academics in France. Each academic contributed to educating these children in their respective homes. The curriculum of The Cooperative was diverse and wide-ranging, and alongside science the students also studied subjects such as sculpture and Chinese language. They were also granted regular time and opportunity to enjoy sports and outdoor activities.
Irène and her sister Ève were sent to Poland to spend the summer with their Aunt Bronia (Marie's sister) in 1911. Irène's education was so rigorous that she still had daily German and trigonometry lessons throughout the break. In 1912, Marie's health was poor; she spent most of the next year and a half in sanitoriums, and her daughters were cared for by a Polish governess. Irène re-entered a more orthodox learning environment by attending high school at the Collège Sévigné in central Paris. In 1914, she went onto the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne to complete a baccalaureate in math and physics, but she was forced to pause her studies in 1916 as the events of World War I led to new responsibilities for the Curie family.
World War I
During the war, Irène took a nursing course and went to work as a nurse radiographer at battlefield hospitals alongside her mother. They supervised 20 mobile X-ray units and set up approximately 200 X-ray centres for injured soldiers.After a few months, Irène was left to work alone at a radiological facility in Belgium. She taught doctors how to locate shrapnel in bodies using radiology and became skilled in repairing the equipment herself. She also trained another 150 women in technical skills for X-ray use in the field. She moved throughout facilities and battlegrounds including two bombsites, Furnes and Ypres, and Amiens. In 1918, she received the Médaille militaire for her assistance in X-ray facilities in France and Belgium.
Irène's radiography work was not without risks. She contracted tuberculosis during the course of her wartime efforts, which would remain a health concern for her over the next two decades. Her heavy exposure to doses of radiation also left her open to the eventual development of other illnesses, such as leukemia, which would much later contribute to her death.
After the war, Irène returned to the Sorbonne in Paris to complete her baccalaureate degree. She went on to become a Doctor of Science in March 1925. Her doctoral thesis was concerned with the alpha decay of polonium, an element discovered by her parents and named after Marie's country of birth, Poland.
Research
In March 1918, Irène Curie joined the Radium Institute in Paris where she initially assisted her mother in her research. During the years she was at the Institute, she mentored a number of the students and researchers, in particular Catherine Chamié, Marthe Klein, Ștefania Mărăcineanu, Marguerite Perey, Angèle Pompéi, Alice Prebil, Elizabeth Rona, Suzanne Veil and Lucienne Wisner.
In 1921, Irène accompanied her mother and her sister Ève on a trip to the United States during which Marie hoped to obtain a gram of radium for her research. In view of her mother's poor health following a heart attack, Irène stepped in to cover some of her assignments, for example by delivering a lecture at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in late May. On 23 May 1921, on behalf of her mother, she accepted an honorary degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
As she neared the end of her doctorate in 1924, Irène Curie was asked to teach the precision laboratory techniques required for radiochemical research to the young chemical engineer Frédéric Joliot, whom she married on 9 October 1926. They had two children together, Hélène (1927) and Pierre (1932). Both later became celebrated scientists.
From 1928, Joliot-Curie and her husband, Frédéric, combined their research efforts on the study of atomic nuclei. In 1932, thanks to their full access to Marie's polonium., they conducted experiments with gamma rays to identify the positron. Though their experiments identified both the positron and the neutron, they failed to interpret the significance of the results and the discoveries were later claimed by Carl David Anderson and James Chadwick respectively.
In 1933, Joliot-Curie and her husband were the first to calculate accurately the mass of the neutron. The Joliot-Curies continued trying to make a name in the scientific community; in doing so, they developed a new theory based on an experiment in which aluminium was bombarded with alpha rays, leading to their discovery that only protons were detected. Based on the undetectable electron and positron pair, they proposed that the protons changed into neutrons and positrons. Later in October 1933, this new theory was presented to the Seventh Solvay Conference. The Solvay Conferences consisted of prominent scientists in the physics and chemistry community. Irène and her husband presented their theory and results to their fellow scientists, but they received criticism of their findings from most of the 46 scientists attending.
In 1934, the Joliot-Curies made a discovery that sealed their place in scientific history. Building on the work of Marie and Pierre Curie, who had isolated naturally occurring radioactive elements, the Joliot-Curies succeeded in transforming one element into another by creating radioactive nitrogen from boron, radioactive isotopes of phosphorus from aluminium, and silicon from magnesium. Irradiating the natural stable isotope of aluminium with alpha particles (i.e. helium nuclei) resulted in an unstable isotope of phosphorus: 27Al + 4He → 30P + 1n. This phosphorus isotope is not found in nature and decays emitting a positron. This discovery is formally known as positron emission or beta decay, where a proton in the radioactive nucleus changes to a neutron and releases a positron and an electron neutrino. By then, the application of radioactive materials for use in medicine was growing, and this discovery allowed radioactive materials to be created quickly, cheaply, and plentifully. The Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935 brought with it fame and recognition from the scientific community and Joliot-Curie was awarded a professorship at the Faculty of Science.
The importance of these scientific successes was somewhat diminished by the death of Marie Curie on 4 July 1934. As a result, Irène took on many of her mother's former responsibilities at the Radium Institute.
The work that Irène's laboratory pioneered, research into radium nuclei, would also help another group of physicists within Germany. Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman on 19 December 1938 bombarded uranium with neutrons, but misinterpreted their findings. Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch would theoretically correct Hahn and Strassmann's findings, and after replicating their experiment based on Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard's theory that he had confided to Meitner back in 1933, confirmed on 13 January 1939 that Hahn and Strassmann had indeed observed nuclear fission: the splitting of the nucleus itself, emitting vast amounts of energy. Lise Meitner's now-famous calculations actually proved that nuclear fission was possible and replicable.
In 1948, using work on nuclear fission, the Joliot-Curies, along with other scientists, created the first French nuclear reactor. The couple were active in the organization behind the project, the French Atomic Energy Commission, Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). Irène was a CEA commissioner while her husband, Frédéric, was its director. The reactor, Zoé (Zéro énergie Oxyde et Eau lourde) used nuclear fission to generate five kilowatts of power. This was the beginning of nuclear energy as a source of power for France.
Years of working so closely with radioactive materials finally caught up with Joliot-Curie, and she was diagnosed with leukemia. She had been accidentally exposed to polonium when a sealed capsule of the element exploded on her laboratory bench in 1946. Treatment with antibiotics and a series of operations relieved her suffering temporarily, but her condition deteriorated. She nevertheless continued to work. In 1955, she prepared plans for new physics laboratories at the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, later completed by her husband.
Political views The Joliot-Curies had become increasingly aware of the growth of the fascist movement. They opposed its ideals and joined the Socialist Party in 1934, the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes a year later, and in 1936 they actively supported the Republican faction in the Spanish Civil War. That year, Irène, Cécile Brunschvicg and Suzanne Lacore became the first three women to be appointed French ministers by the French prime minister Léon Blum who belonged to the Popular front. Irène was appointed undersecretary of state for scientific research, in which capacity she helped in founding the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).. She later resigned to continue scientific research.
Frédéric and Irène visited Moscow for the two hundred and twentieth anniversary of the Russian Academy of Science and returned sympathizing with Russian colleagues. Frédéric's close connection with the Communist Party later caused Irène to be detained on Ellis Island during her third trip to the United States when she was invited to speak in support of Spanish refugees by the Joint Antifascist Refugee Committee.