Irene Joliot-Curie
Irène Joliot-Curie (Paris, September 12, 1897-ibid., March 17, 1956) was a French physicist, chemist, politician, anti-fascist activist, and feminist. She was awarded with her husband the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for discovering induced radioactivity or artificial radioactivity. She was one of the first three women members of a government in France when she was appointed Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research by the Popular Front in 1936. Activist for women's rights, she accepted the position, for a predefined limited period of three months to support the cause of women and scientific research.
Biography
She was born in Paris, she is the eldest daughter of Marie Curie (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911) and Pierre Curie (Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903). After the accidental death of her father on April 19, 1906, Irène and her sister Ève de ella are educated in a "teaching cooperative"; from 1907 to 1909 created by Marie with her university friends who taught her according to her specialty.
She finished high school at the Collège de Sévigné, an independent school in central Paris. He entered the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Paris in October 1914 to study physics and mathematics. He faced the First World War in 1916 at the age of 17 and supported his mother in the radiology service in the army with the so-called petites curies, radiological ambulances. He extended the work directing the development of X-ray diagnostic devices in military hospital facilities in Belgium and France. After the war he received the Military Medal.
Once the war was over, she was appointed assistant to her mother at the Radio Institute in Paris, later known as the Curie Institute. She has been her mother's assistant since 1919. She also works on her own research and obtains a PhD in Science in 1925.
Together with her mother, she met her personal assistant, Frédéric Joliot, whom she married on October 8, 1926, adopting the joint surname Joliot-Curie. works with her husband on neutron research. Together they discovered artificial radioactivity in January 1934, for which both were recognized with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935.
Both are part of a network of scientists with a social, positive and universal vocation for science. In 1934, his mother Marie died of leukemia, a common disease at the time for those who worked without sufficient protection with radioactivity.
Anti-fascist commitment
In 1934, following the rise of fascism and the riots by far-right leagues on February 6, Irène Joliot-Curie became actively involved in politics. After his contact with the SFIO -for a brief period, a member of the SFIO distancing himself from it because he did not agree with the non-intervention of the Blum government to defend the Spanish republic- he participated in the Vigilance Committee against Fascism, founded by the communist physicist Paul Langevin, of whom she is a close friend: "We have come to declare to all the workers, our comrades, our resolution to fight with them to save against a fascist dictatorship what the people have gained in terms of of rights and public liberties ”, affirms the Manifesto. She supported the Popular Front and in June 1936, Irène Joliot-Curie was appointed by Léon Blum Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research, becoming with the socialist Suzanne Lacore and the radical Cécile Brunschvicg, the first three women in French history to form part, on a date when French women still do not have the right to vote (they will get it in 1944). She suffered the prevailing misogyny at the time: Nobel Prize in 1935, Undersecretary of State in 1936, but her minister, Jean Zay, despite everything, forbade her to speak in the National Assembly. For health reasons along with disagreements with Léon Blum Because he was against getting involved in the defense of the Spanish Republic threatened by the Francoists, three months later he left office and was succeeded by Jean Perrin, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926. He managed, however, to define some important guidelines for a public research policy: increase in salaries and scholarships for researchers and increase in the research budget.
During the Second World War (1939 - 1945) he decided to stay in France despite the Occupation and because of his health problems that forced him to frequent stays in the Dordogne or Haute-Savoie sanatoriums. He hides the radio near Périgueux and protects Jewish researchers or members of the resistance. He finally moves to the South zone and then crosses the Atlantic. From the moment her husband goes into hiding, she moves to Switzerland to protect her children. She crosses the border on June 6, 1944 and will not return until September.
In January 1945, she was appointed commissioner of Atomic Energy, she is the only woman among five commissioners, she contributed to the first French atomic pile, Zoé, which started up on December 12, 1948.
She was "travel companion" of the French Communist Party (PCF) of which her husband was an active member but never joined. In 1945 he assumed the vice-presidency of the Union of French Women and was part of the World Committee for Peace and Development, and intervened in the Congress World Cup of Women against War and Fascism.
After the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he campaigned against the military use of nuclear energy. He initially supported the USSR, where he signed the Stockholm appeal in 1950 against the military use of atomic energy with Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell and later the Russell-Einstein peace manifesto in 1955.
In parallel, he continues with his teaching and research work, particularly on the radioactivity of minerals and materials. In 1946 she is a professor of physics and radioactivity at the Sorbonne and succeeds André Debierne, her family tutor and successor to Marie Curie as patron of the Radium Institute.
She was removed from the French Atomic Energy Commission in 1951 for her sympathies with the French Communist Party.
Although her work is internationally recognized, between 1951 and 1954 she was rejected four times as a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. Rejected from the Academy of Sciences in 1951, she decided to represent herself at every opportunity to denounce the exclusion of women from this institution. It was not until 1962 that a woman, Marguerite Perey, a student of Marie Curie and a collaborator of Irène Joliot-Curie, first entered the Academy of Sciences as a corresponding member.
"Immortals don't want women," he writes, recalling that his mother Marie Curie was rejected in 1910.
In 1954 she was commissioned to create a new university research center in Orsay. His goal was to build a particle accelerator in Orsay which became a reality a few weeks before he died. Irène Joliot-Curie died on March 17, 1956 at her Paris residence as a result of leukemia, resulting from overexposure to radiation in the course of his work.
Scientific research
Together with her husband, she began her research in the field of nuclear physics and searching for the structure of the atom, particularly in the structure and projection of the nucleus and which was fundamental for the subsequent discovery of the neutron in 1932, and in 1934 they achieved artificially produce radioactive elements.
In 1935, both scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for their work on the synthesis of new radioactive elements." The two worked on chain reactions and the requirements for the successful construction of a nuclear reactor using controlled nuclear fission to generate power using uranium and heavy water.