Radioactivity Joliot-Curies’ research

In 1921, Irene Curie (1897-1956) began research at the Radium Institute. Five years later she married Frederic Joliot (1900-1958). a brilliant young physicist who was also an assistant at the Institute. In 1931, they began a research program in nuclear chemistry that led to several important discoveries and at least one near miss. The Joliot-Curies were the first to demonstrate induced radioactivity. They also discovered the positron, a particle that scientists had been seeking for many years. They narrowly missed finding another, more fundamental particle, the neutron. That honor went to James Chadwick in England. In 1935,... 

The creation, by neutron bombardment of uranium, of the so-called transuraniums is based on the discovery of artificial radioactivity by M. and Mme. Joliot-Curie. Irene Curie was bom in Paris in September, 1897, the elder daughter of M. and Mme. Pierre Curie of honored memory. Both in Poland and in France she had many relatives who were devoting their lives to science, and from her earliest childhood she lived in a scientific atmosphere, among distinguished chemists and physicists. When Irene was less than a year old, her mother discovered the radioactive element polonium, which was destined to play an important part in the later researches of both mother and daughter. A few months later M. and Mme. Curie discovered another element of even greater importance, which they named radium. 

Since other projectiles, such as neutrons, protons, and deuterons, have also been used to produce artificial radioactivity, the number of active elements thus created already exceeds by far the number of naturally occurring radio-elements (129, 130, 131). By January, 1940, three hundred and thirty artificial radioactivities had been described these include isotopes of every known element in the range of atomic numbers 1 to 85 inclusive, as well as isotopes of thorium (atomic number 90) and of uranium (atomic number 92) (132). Thus the work of M. and Mme. Joliot-Curie opened up vast avenues of research on the physical, chemical, and radioactive properties of these isotopes and on their therapeutic uses. In 1935 they were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry (133). 

When George Karl von Hevesy developed the technique of isotope dilution analysis (chapter 3), his source of lead isotopes was the natural decay of radioactive substances. In his 1944 Nobel lecture, Hevesy related his utopian wish from that period, some two decades earlier [Imagine] the great progress which might be expected if radioactive indicators of the common elements were made available to chemical and biological research. This was the discovery of the Joliot-Curies made in 1934, a... 

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