Irène Joliot-Curie

Background

Ethnicity: Joliot-Curie's father was French, and her mother was Polish.

Irène Joliot-Curie was born Irène Curie on September 12, 1897, in Paris, France. Her father, Pierre Curie, married the brilliant Polish student Marie Sklodowska in July 1895. Their marriage marked the beginning of a close collaboration between two dedicated scientific researchers which culminated in the discovery of radium hardly more than a year after the birth of Irène, their first child. Marie Curie’s devotion to her laboratory work left her little time to spend with her daughter. Young Irène would have had scarcely any company other than her governesses had not her grandfather, Eugène Curie, come to live with Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898. Eugène Curie, a doctor, had distinguished himself by treating the wounded during the uprising in Paris of June 1848 and of the Commune of 1871. Until his death in 1910 he exerted a great influence on Irène’s personality, especially after her father’s death in 1906.

Education

Marie Curie very early took charge of Joliot-Curie’s scientific education. Her education began at a school near the 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 and Marie chose to focus on that instead of public school. She then studied at the teaching cooperative established by some of Marie’s colleagues and friends for their own children: Marie Curie taught physics; Paul Langevin, mathematics; and Jean Perrin, chemistry. Joliot-Curie next went to the Collège Sévigné; she received her baccalauréat just before the outbreak of World War I. From then until 1920 she studied at the Sorbonne and took the examinations for a licence in physics and mathematics.

In 1921 she began scientific research. Her first important investigation concerned the fluctuations in the range of a rays. She determined these variations by photographing the tracks that the rays formed in a Wilson cloud chamber. Presented in her doctoral thesis in 1925, this work was followed by a series of studies on classical radioactivity.

Career

During the war Joliot-Curie served for many months as an army nurse, assisting her mother in setting up apparatus for the radiography of the wounded; at the age of eighteen, she had sole responsibility for installing radiographic equipment in an Anglo-Canadian hospital a few miles from the front in Flanders.

In 1918 Irène Curie became an assistant at the Radium Institute, of which her mother was the director, and in 1921 she began scientific research on classical radioactivity, some of which were in collaboration with Frédéric Joliot. Not until 1931, however, did they begin the constant collaboration, lasting several years, that brought them the Nobel Prize. It is worth noting that for their Nobel addresses Frédéric, considered to be the physicist, chose to deal with the chemical identification of the artificially created radioisotopes, while Irène, the chemist, recounted the discovery of a new type of radioactivity. Marie Curie died of acute leukemia in July 1934 and thus could not witness the triumph of her daughter and son-in-law, which duplicated her own accomplishment with Pierre Curie thirty-two years earlier.

After serving for four months in 1936 as secretary of state in Léon Blum’s Popular Front government, Joliot-Curie was elected professor at the Sorbonne in 1937. She continued to work at the Radium Institute, while Frédéric Joliot transferred his research activities to the Collège de France, where he had received a professorship.

It was during these years preceding World War II that Joliot-Curie did her most remarkable individual work. Aided by her great experience in radiochemistry, she sought to analyze the complex phenomena that result from bombarding uranium with neutrons. First brought to light by Enrico Fermi, these phenomena were subsequently studied by Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. This discovery led them to suppose the formation not only of several transuranic radioelements but also of new radioisotopes of elements preceding uranium (down to radium itself). Irène Joliot-Curie, in collaboration with the Yugoslav physicist P. P. Savic, showed that, among the radioisotopes formed, a radioelement with a period of 3.5 hours could be carried away by adding actinium to the solution of irradiated uranium and then separating it out again through precipitation. But this radioelement was not an isotope of actinium, since by adding lanthanum to the actinium extract and then separating it out again through fractional precipitations, the new radioelement was shown to follow lanthanum, its chemical properties, therefore, being closer to those of lanthanum than to those of actinium.

Reproducing these experiments, the result of which he found surprising, Otto Hahn proved that the bombardment of uranium with neutrons produces not only radioactive atoms possessing chemical properties very similar to those of the lanthanides but also, undoubtedly, atoms of a radioactive isotope of barium. This was the proof that a neutron can induce the bipartition of a uranium atom into two atoms of a comparable mass - a phenomenon soon afterward termed “fission.” Irène Joliot-Curie had instigated this important discovery - which she herself would probably have made had a fortuitous complication not concealed the formation of a true radioisotope of lanthanum in the uranium irradiated by neutrons. The former existed in association with a radioisotope of promethium with a similar period, which explains why the fractional precipitation of the lanthanum separated from the actinium results in the appearance in the top fractions of an increase in the 3.5-hour activity period.

At the time of the German invasion in 1940 Joliot-Curie decided to remain in France with the researchers in her laboratory. In 1944, a few months before the liberation of Paris, the Communist resistance organization, fearing that she might suffer reprisals for the resistance activities of her husband, who had gone underground, had her smuggled into Switzerland with her children. In 1946 she was named director of the Radium Institute, created for her mother some thirty years before, in which she conducted all her own research. From 1946 to 1950 she was also one of the directors of the French Atomic Energy Commission, of which Frédéric Joliot was the high commissioner.

Joliot-Curie divided her efforts in the following years between the creation of the Radium Institute’s large, new laboratories at Orsay, a southern suburb of Paris, and working for women’s pacifist movements. She died at the age of fifty-eight, a victim, like her mother, of acute leukemia. The disease was undoubtedly a consequence of the X and y radiations to which she had been exposed, first as an inadequately protected nurse-radiologist during World War I and then in the laboratory, when the dangers of radioactivity were still not fully realized.

Achievements

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  Irène Joliot-Curie’s fame stems principally from the discoveries she made with her husband, Frédéric Joliot, particularly that of artificial radioactivity, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935. Yet her own investigations on the radioelements produced by the irradiation of uranium with neutrons were sufficiently important to secure her a position among the great modern scientists.
  
  In 1932 she received the Matteucci Medal. In 1940 she and her husband received the Barnard College Gold Medal for Meritorious Service to Science. She was also named the Officer of the Legion of Honor and received the Order of the Cross of Grunwald, 3rd class. She was also awarded an honorary degree by the Jagiellonian University of Krakow.
  
  Her name was added to the Monument to the X-ray and Radium Martyrs of All Nations erected in Hamburg, Germany.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Production artificielle d'éléments radioactifs 1934
  • Exposes de radioactivite et de physique nucleaire 1935
  • Progres recents es radioactivité et en physique nucleaire 1950
  • Oeuvres Scientifques Completes 1961
  • Atomistique et chimie générale 1941

Religion

It was to her grandfather, a convinced freethinker, that Joliot-Curie owed her atheism, later politically expressed as anticlericalism.

Politics

Joliot-Curie's grandfather was the source of her attachment to the liberal socialism to which she remained faithful all her life.

The Joliot-Curies were 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 Republicans faction in the Spanish Civil War. In the same year, Joliot-Curie was appointed Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research by the French government, in which capacity she helped in founding the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Joliot-Curie's political career continued after the war and she became a commissioner in the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique.

Views

Joliot-Curie fought through many struggles to advocate for her own personal views. She was a passionate member of the feminist movement, especially in regard to the sciences, was actively involved in promoting women's education, and also advocated for peace. She continuously applied to the Academy of Sciences, an elite scientific organization, knowingly that she would be denied. She did so to draw attention to the fact they did not accept women in the organization. Joliot-Curie was also involved in many speaking functions such as the International Women's day conference. She also played a big role for the French contingent at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace, which promoted the World Peace movement. In 1948, during a strike involving coal miners, Joliot-Curie reached out to Paris Newsletters to convince families to temporarily adopt the children of the coal miners during the strike.

Quotations: "That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life - this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following."

Membership

Joliot-Curie served on the National Committee of the Union of French Women and the World Peace Council. She was also a member of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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  Member

  National Committee of the Union of French Women , France

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  Member

  German Academy of Sciences , Germany

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  Member

  Russian Academy of Sciences , Russia

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  Member

  World Peace Council

• Member

  Royal Academy of Medicine , Belgium

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  Member

  Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences , Netherlands

Personality

Honors did not change Joliot-Curie, who retained throughout her life a great simplicity and a thorough uprightness. Her pensive attitude made her appear somewhat slow and aloof, but she could be quite lively with her few close friends.

She loved to be close to nature and enjoyed rowing, sailing, and especially swimming during vacations in Brittany. She was also fond of taking long walks in the mountains, where she was often obliged to go because of a tubercular condition.

Although her interest in science was preeminent, she deeply loved the writings of certain French and English authors, especially Victor Hugo and Rudyard Kipling; she even translated some of Kipling’s poems.

She found great joy in motherhood and, despite the hours spent in the laboratory, devoted much time to her children until their adolescence.

Physical Characteristics: During 1941 through 1943 of World War II, Joliot-Curie contracted tuberculosis.

Years of being exposed to radioactive materials impacted her life. During the last days, she suffered from leukemia, which was a direct result of the accidental exposure to polonium in 1946, when a sealed capsule containing the element exploded. Though a series of operation temporarily relieved her, she failed to make it up.

Interests

• reading

• Writers

  Victor Hugo, Rudyard Kipling

• Sport & Clubs

  rowing, sailing, swimming, mountaineering

Connections

Joliot-Curie married Frédéric Joliot on October 26, 1926. They had two children, Hélène, born eleven months after they were married, and Pierre, born in 1932. The daughter went on to become a nuclear physicist and professor at the University of Paris. Her son went on to become a biochemist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. In 1948, the Joliot-Curies adopted two girls.

Father:

Pierre Curie

Mother:

Marie Curie

Spouse:

Frédéric Joliot

Sister:

Eve Curie

Grandfather:

Eugène Curie

Grandfather:

Wladislaw Sklodowsky

grandmother:

Bronislava Marianna Sklodowska

Uncle:

Jozef Sklodowsky

grandmother:

Sophie-Claire Depouilly

Daughter:

Hélène Langevin-Joliot

Son:

Pierre Joliot

Grandson:

Marc Joliot

Grandson:

Alain Joliot

Grandson:

Yves Langevin

aunt:

Helena Szalay Sklodowska

aunt:

Zofia Maria Sklodowska

aunt:

Bronislawa Maria Sklodowska

teacher:

Paul Langevin

teacher:

Jean Perrin

colleague:

P. P. Savic

Friend:

Albert Einstein

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Volume 7
  1973
• Radioactive! How Irène Curie and Lise Meitner Revolutionized Science and Changed the World
  2016
• Irène Joliot-Curie
  1991
• Marie Curie and Her Daughter Irene
  1993