Irene Curie (1897-1956), French chemist, with an unidentified man at the Standard Chemical Company, Pennsylvania, USA, in around 1921. Irene was the daughter of the famous nuclear physicist Marie Curie. She worked with her mother at the Radium Institute in Paris from 1918 where she met, and in 1926 married, Frederic Joliot, her mother's assistant. She worked with her husband on artificial radioactivity, making the first artificial radio-element. They shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Standard Chemical Company operated a radium refining mill supplying radium for watch dials. Irene Joliot-Curie served in the French cabinet and on the French Atomic Energy Commission, and was made an Officer of the Legion of Honour. She died of leukaemia, probably due to exposure to cancer-causing radiation. |