Irene Joliot-Curie Facts
Irene Joliot-Curie Facts
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| Interesting Irene Joliot-Curie Facts: |
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| Irene Curie was born in Paris, the daughter of Nobel Prize winning physicists Pierre and Marie Curie. |
| When she was 10, her parents realized that she was a gifted mathematician and they joined with other French scientists and scholars to form a special school for gifted children called "The Cooperative." |
| From 1912 to 1914 she studied at the College of Sevigne and received her B.S. from the Sorbonne. |
| During World War I Curie worked at the mobile field hospitals her mother had established and assisted doctors in using the primitive X-ray equipment to local shrapnel in wounds. |
| After the war she studied at the Radium Institute, and in 1925 her doctoral thesis on the alpha rays of polonium earned her a PhD. |
| In 1926 she married Frederic Joliot and they hyphenated their surnames to Joliot-Curie. |
| In 1934 Curie and her husband discovered that one element could be turned into another by creating radioactive nitrogen from boron and radioactive isotopes of phosphorus from aluminum. |
| Radioactive isotopes were becoming increasingly important in medicine and this discovery provided a way to make them cheaply and easily. |
| She led a group studying radium nuclei that which became an important foundational work in the discovery of nuclear fission. |
| In 1946 she was accidentally exposed to polonium in a laboratory accident; combined with her years of working with radioactive materials, this eventually resulted in leukemia. |
| The Joliot-Curies actively opposed the Nazi Party's policies and in 1934 they joined the Socialist Party. |
| Until 1939 they had published all of their work for the benefit of science but, fearing its use by the German military, put all of their papers in the vaults of the French Academy of Sciences where they stayed until 1949. |
| During World War II she contracted tuberculosis and spent several years in Switzerland at a convalescent hospital. |
| She and her husband were awarded membership in the Legion d'honneur. |
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