About Irène Joliot-Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie (French: [iʁɛn ʒɔljo kyʁi]; née Curie; 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French chemist and physicist who received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, for their discovery of induced radioactivity. The couple also discovered positron emission in their process. They were the second married couple, after her parents, to win the Nobel Prize, adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date. Her mother Marie Skłodowska-Curie and she also form the only mother–daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes whilst Pierre and Irène Curie form the only father-daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes by the same occasion, whilst six father-son pairs have won Nobel Prizes by comparison. She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front in 1936. Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also scientists. In 1945, she was one of the six commissioners of the new French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) created by de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic. She died in Paris on 17 March 1956 from an acute leukemia linked to her exposure to polonium and X-rays. Her doctoral thesis was concerned with the alpha decay of polonium, the element discovered by her parents (along with radium) and named after Marie's country of birth, Poland.
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