Irène Joliot-Curie
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Irène Joliot-Curie
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1935
Born: 12 September 1897, Paris, France
Died: 17 March 1956, Paris, France
Affiliation at the time of the award: Institut du Radium, Paris, France
Prize motivation: “in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
Irene Curie was born in Paris as the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, who went on to become Nobel Laureates in physics and chemistry. Irene Curie worked together with her mother to provide mobile X-ray units during World War I. She resumed her studies at the university in Paris after the war and later worked at the institute that her parents had founded. It was there that she conducted her Nobel Prize-awarded work together with Frédéric Joliot, whom she married in 1926. The couple was politically active and worked to combat fascism and Nazism. They had two children.
Work
Radiation from radioactive substances also became an important tool in investigating atoms. When Irene Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot bombarded a thin piece of aluminum with alpha particles (helium atom nuclei) in 1934, a new kind of radiation was discovered that left traces inside an apparatus known as a cloud chamber. The pair discovered that the radiation from the aluminum continued even after the source of radiation was removed. This was because aluminum atoms had been converted into a radioactive isotope of phosphorus. That meant that, for the first time in history, a radioactive element had been created artificially.
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Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
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