Frederic Joliot-Curie

Frederic Joliot-Curie was a French physicist who, with his wife Irene Joliot-Curie, discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934, work for which the couple shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1939 Joliot-Curie's research team was among the first to demonstrate that uranium fission released enough secondary neutrons to sustain a chain reaction, and he filed several early patents on reactor and enrichment concepts before the war interrupted the research. After the war he became the founding High Commissioner of the French Commissariat a l'energie atomique and oversaw construction of Zoe, the first French nuclear reactor, which went critical in December 1948, before being removed from the position in 1950 over his Communist Party political activities.