Irène Joliot-Curie Net Worth

Background and career

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, also known as artificial radioactivity. The couple also discovered positron emission during their research. They were the second married couple, after her parents, to win the prize, adding to the Curie family's unbeaten legacy of four Nobel Prizes.

The eldest child of scientists Marie and Pierre Curie, Irène grew up showing talent in mathematics and received a rigorous education from her mother and other prominent French scholars as part of a private cooperative of students. She served as a nurse radiographer at battlefield hospitals during World War I, supervising mobile X-ray units and teaching doctors how to locate shrapnel in wounds using radiology. In 1918, she joined her mother at the Radium Institute in Paris, conducting research on the alpha decay of polonium for her doctorate in 1925.

Irène and her husband jointly studied atomic nuclei during the 1930s, and they contributed directly to the creation of the first French nuclear reactor in 1948. She was one of the first three women to be appointed a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for scientific research under the Popular Front in 1936. In 1945, she was one of six commissioners of the newly established French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) created by de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic. Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, also became scientists.

Irène Joliot-Curie died in Paris on 17 March 1956 from acute leukemia linked to her long-term exposure to polonium and X-rays. The annual Prix Joliot-Curie and Irène Joliot-Curie Prize are named in her honour. In 2026, Irène Joliot-Curie was announced as one of 72 historical women in STEM whose names were proposed to be added to the 72 men already celebrated on the Eiffel Tower.