Irene Joliot-Curie, Frederic Joliot-Curie

Irene Joliot-Curie is the daughter of Marie Curie, a double Nobel Prize-winner. In 1925, Irene Curie became Doctor of Science.

In 1926, Irene married her colleague Frederic Joliot, an assistant at the Radium Institute. With him, she continued experiments with various chemical elements. In some of these experiments, Irene and Frederic performed bombardment of boron, and aluminium with alpha particles, thereby producing new chemical elements. These new elements were radioactive: aluminum became radioactive phosphorus, while boron became a radioactive isotope of nitrogen. Within a short time, Joliot-Curie created many new radioactive elements. In 1935, Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their artificial creation of new radioactive elements Working with uranium in the late 1930s, Irene Joliot-Curie made several important discoveries and came close to the discovery of uranium decay, when bombarded with neutrons.

Jean Frederic Joliot was born in Paris, in the family of a prosperous merchant Henri Joliot and Emilia (Roederer) Joliot, who came from a wealthy Protestant family from Alsace.

Frederic obtained his Doctor of Science degree in 1930 for a thesis on the electrochemistry of radioactive polonium. Having received the Nobel Prize in 1935 together with his wife, 35-year-old Frederick still remains the youngest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

The discoveries and achievements of the Joliot-Curie family laid the foundation for further research in nuclear physics, chemistry, and nuclear medicine. Without their discoveries, it is impossible to imagine modern science and everyday life.