JOIN USThe Battlefield Radiologist
I recently stumbled upon the digital archive of Women who changed Science, created by the Nobel Media, to celebrate the contributions and lives of the women awarded the Nobel Prize in science; and I was struck by the remarkable contributions of Irene Joliot-Curie, awarded the Prize in 1935. What follows is her story; a beautiful, poignant and inspiring story it is.
Irène Curie was a battlefield radiologist, politician, activist, and daughter of two of the most famous scientists in the world: Marie and Pierre Curie. Along with her husband, Frédéric, she invented the first-ever artificially created radioactive atoms, paving the way for innumerable medical advances, especially in the fight against cancer.
Irène was born in Paris in 1897, six years before her parents were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Since her parents were largely absent, working long hours to isolate radioactive elements, the young Irene was raised by her paternal grandfather, Eugene, a retired doctor, who taught her to love nature, poetry, and radical politics. Her education was sometimes unusual. When she was a young teenager, Irene attended a cooperative ‘school’ organised by her mother, in which six professors taught each other’s children in their subjects of expertise, from physics and mathematics to German and art.
Fame visited the Curie family in 1903, followed soon after by tragedy. In 1906, when she was eight years old, Pierre Curie was killed in an accident. Marie Curie began to spend more time with her daughter, and over the years, Irene took the place of her father as a colleague of her mother’s.
During World War I, Irene learned first-hand that science could save lives. She soon found herself assisting her mother, whose mission was to bring the power of the X-ray to help field surgeons find shrapnel in wounded soldiers. At age 18, she was running radiology units in mobile field hospitals, teaching nurses to run X-ray machines, and operating them herself on the Belgian front.
After the war, while working toward her doctorate, Irene became her mother’s assistant at the Radium Institute, where her mother asked her to train fellow researcher, Frédéric Joliot. As she taught this chemical engineer about the various methods of their radiochemical lab, she found in Joliot a partner in work who could also be a partner in life. The two young scientists married in 1926, and by 1928 were signing all their research jointly. In the early 1930s, the Joliot-Curies twice came close to making significant discoveries, but misinterpreted the results of their experiments -- experiments that identified both the positron and the neutron, if only they had realised it.
At last, in 1934, they made the discovery that would alter the course of radiation research and secure their place in the history of science. After bombarding aluminium foil with alpha-particles (helium nuclei), they noticed that the aluminium continued to emit positrons even after the bombardment of alpha-particles had stopped. They deduced that alpha-particle bombardment had converted stable aluminium atoms into radioactive atoms. In other words, they had manufactured radioactive atoms.
The ability to artificially create radioactive atoms changed the course of modern physics. Before this, the only way for scientists to obtain radioactive elements was to extract them from their natural ores, a difficult and costly process. Now that they could be made in a laboratory, there was an explosion of research into radioisotopes and the practical applications of radiochemistry, especially in medicine. Radioisotopes quickly became -- and remain -- invaluable tools in biomedical research and in cancer treatment.
For discovering that radioactive atoms could be created artificially, the Joliot-Curies received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. Irene Joliot-Curie next helped conduct research into radium nuclei that led a separate group of German physicists to the discovery of nuclear fission, the splitting of the nucleus itself, and the vast amounts of energy emitted as a result. In 1946, she became director of the Radium Institute.
After receiving the Nobel Prize, she turned her attention to politics. Years before women could vote in France, she became the Undersecretary of State for Science, advocating state funding of scientific research. A member of the Comité National de l’Union des Femmes Françaises and of the World Peace Council, she spoke against Fascism and Nazism, and for advancing women’s education.
Irene Joliot-Curie was an atheist, a passionate feminist, and an anti-war pacifist. Tragically, as her mother did before her, and her husband would just two years after, she died of leukemia in 1956, caused possibly by exposure to radiation. She was 58 years old, still researching, running the institute, and attending international conferences for peace and women’s rights. A citizen-scientist to the end, convinced that ‘mere knowledge and intelligence cannot make a scientist’; showing by example how to be compassionate. The one unmistakable lesson we can draw from her life.