Irene Joliot-Curie

Irene Joliot-Curie was a French chemist and physicist, daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, who discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934 together with her husband Frederic Joliot-Curie by bombarding aluminum, boron and magnesium with alpha particles to produce new radioactive isotopes of elements that do not occur naturally in radioactive form. The discovery, for which the couple shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, showed that radioactivity could be manufactured rather than only found in naturally occurring heavy elements, opening the way to the artificially produced isotopes later used throughout nuclear research. She went on to direct the Radium Institute in Paris founded by her mother and served briefly as France's Under-Secretary of State for Scientific Research in 1936.