Irène Joliot-Curie and her mother Marie Curie both were awarded Nobel Prizes in Chemistry: Irène in 1935 and Marie in 1911. Irène was born on September 12, 1897 in Paris. Until her father died in 1906, she studied at home. She then began her public education at the French lyceum, which was interrupted once for two and a half years when her mother ran a private cooperative school, teaching the children science, mathematics, literature, art, natural sciences, English, and German. She finished high school just as World War I was beginning and helped her mother with the war effort, traveling throughout France installing X-ray units in military hospitals and training medical personnel to use them. When the war was over, she became Marie's assistant at the Radium Institute in Paris. Later, Joliot-Curie earned a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne for her work on the analysis of alpha particles emitted by polonium as it disintegrates.

In 1926, she married Frédéric Joliot, a physicist from the Radium Institute. They worked together, focusing on the bombardment of elements with particles emitted from radioactive polonium. Using alpha particles to bombard aluminum, they observed that a neutron and radioactive phosphorus formed first, followed by its decomposition to silicon and a positron. This was the first time artificial radioactivity had been documented. It was for this work that Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie received the Nobel Prize in 1935. They continued to work together, for a total of 30 years, until Irène died on March 17, 1956 in the Radium Institute's hospital in Paris. Irène, her husband, and her mother all died of what Frédéric Joliot-Curie called "our occupational disease", that is, radiation-induced illnesses.

1. Distinguished Women of Past and Present: Irene Joliot-Curie
2. The Nobel Prize Internet Archive: Irene Joliot-Curie
3. Nobel e-Museum: Biography of Irène Joliot-Curie

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6. The Who's Who of Nobel Prize Winners 1901-1990, 2nd ed.; Schlessinger, B. S., Ed.; Oryx Press: Phoenix, AZ, 1991; p 14.