Marie Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie: Like Mother, Like Daughter

Marie Curie you’ve probably heard of.  She and her husband Pierre shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

(For Marie, it was a special honor as she was the first woman EVER to win a Nobel Prize in Physics.)  Marie was the first to determine that radioactivity (a term she coined) begins inside the atom.

Her daughter, Irene, was no slouch either.

Irene, a physical chemist, studied at the College Sevigne, and went on to work as her mother’s assistant at the Institut du Radium in Paris.

She and her mother devoted themselves to the development of X-ray technology and even started a mobile X-ray service that treated more than a million patients.

Irene met her future husband, Frederic Joliot, at the College Sevigne, and the couple discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934, a discovery that contributed to the development of nuclear energy.

In 1935, Irene and HER husband shared a Nobel Prize, making her mother, Marie, the first woman ever to win a Nobel herself and see her daughter win one.

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