Joliot-Curie Dies: Nobel Physicist Claimed by Radiation

Irene Joliot-Curie died of acute leukemia on March 17, 1956, at age fifty-eight, almost certainly caused by decades of radiation exposure during her research, the same fate that had killed her mother Marie Curie twenty-two years earlier. Irene and her husband Frederic had discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934 by bombarding aluminum with alpha particles to produce a radioactive isotope of phosphorus that did not exist in nature. This breakthrough earned them the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and opened the path to nuclear medicine, enabling the production of radioactive isotopes used in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Irene was also politically active: she served as Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research in Leon Blum's Popular Front government in 1936, one of the first women to hold a cabinet position in France. She worked at the Curie Institute her mother had founded, maintaining the family's extraordinary scientific dynasty while knowingly exposing herself to the radiation that would kill her.