Pierre joliot
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Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot, a wife-and-husband team, received a Nobel Prize for their artificial creation of radioactive isotopes. With their discovery of “artificial” or “induced” radioactivity, radioactive atoms could be prepared relatively inexpensively, a boon to the progress of nuclear physics and medicine.
As a child, Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956) had the unusual experience of attending for two years a special school that emphasized science, organized by her mother, Marie Curie, and Marie’s scientific friends for their own children. Irène was still a teenager when she worked with her Nobel Prize–winning mother in the radiography corps during World War I.
After the war she assisted her mother at the Radium Institute in Paris, meanwhile completing her doctorate. She married Frédéric Joliot (1900–1958), a young physicist who had come to work with her mother.
Man-Made Radioactivity
The Joliot-Curies won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their artificial creation of new radioactive elements by bombardment of alpha particles (helium nuclei, He2+) on vari
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Irène Joliot-Curie (1897 - 1956)
Irène Curie was born in Paris, France, on September 12, 1897. The daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, she studied at the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne, but her education was interrupted by World War I, during which she served as a nurse radiographer. After the war, she earned her doctorate in science, doing her thesis on the alpha rays of polonium.
In 1926, Curie married Frédéric Joliot (the couple both joined their surnames) and collaborated with him on natural and artificial radioactivity, transmutation of elements and nuclear physics. In 1935, they shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements. In 1936, she was appointed Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research and was ultimately named an Officer of the Legion of Honour.
A member of several foreign academies and of numerous scientific societies, Joliot-Curie had honorary doctor's degrees from several universities. She was the Chair of Nuclear Physics at the Sorbonne. She became Professor in th
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Irene Joliot-Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie (1897-1956) was a French scientist and 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner. While she was not a part of the Manhattan Project, her earlier research was instrumental in the creation of the atomic bomb.
Early Life
As the daughter of renowned scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, Irene developed an early interest in science. During World War I, she worked with her mother at the mobile field hospitals, operating the x-ray machines that her mother developed. Irene then returned to Paris to study chemistry at her parents’ Radium Institute where she wrote her doctoral thesis about radiation emitted by polonium. The same year, her future husband Frederic Joliot joined the Radium Institute. Like her parents, they decided to conduct research jointly.
Scientific Contributions
In 1933, the Joliot-Curies made the discovery that radioactive elements can be artificially produced from stable elements. This was done by exposing aluminum foil to alpha particles. When the radioactive source was removed, the Joliot-Curies discovered
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