Irene Joliot-Curie (1897 – 1956), daughter of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie, was a French chemist, physicist and politician. She obtained, with her husband, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and was Under-Secretary of State under the Popular Front.
In the footsteps of his mother
Born in Paris on September 12, 1897, Irène is the first daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, who will have one second, Eve, in 1904. As she began normal schooling, her parents quickly noticed her great predisposition for mathematics. They then formed a circle of intellectuals, including Paul Langevin, whose objective was to contribute to the education of other people's children on a wide variety of subjects. Irène thus benefited from a high quality education for two years before entering the Collège Sévigné and then the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne. In 1906, his father died accidentally.
His studies were interrupted by the First World War. At 17, Irène accompanies her mother to the front to perform X-rays on soldiers wounded in combat. On her return from the war, with a baccalaureate, she assisted her mother at the Institut du Radium (which has since become Institut Curie), which she had just created with Henri Becquerel. There, Irène meets another assistant of Marie Curie, Frédéric Joliot. They married in 1926 and had two children:Hélène in 1927 and Pierre in 1932.
Physicist and politician
Working together on natural radioactivity and on the action of neutrons on heavy elements, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie discovered artificial radioactivity, which consists in transforming a stable element into a radioactive element. In 1934, Marie Curie died of leukemia due to her excessive exposure to radioactivity. In 1935, Irène and Frédéric together received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work.
In 1936, the Popular Front won the legislative elections and Léon Blum integrated three women – who then did not have the right to vote – into his government, in state secretaries. Irène Joliot-Curie thus became Under-Secretary of State for Scientific Research, one of the first women to sit in a French government along with Suzanne Lacore and Cécile Brunschvicg. Weakened by health problems, however, she only held this position for three months.
In 1937, Irène became a lecturer and then a professor at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris. In 1939, she was named an officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1946, she became director of the Radium Institute and participated in the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); she was its curator for six years.
Irène Joliot-Curie died on March 17, 1956 in Paris of leukemia resulting, like that of her mother, from excessive exposure to radioactivity.