Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie was born March 19, 1900 in Paris, France. His parents were, Henri Joliot, a merchant, and his mother was Emilie Roederer. He earned a doctorate degree in Science in 1930. He was a graduate of École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris and an assistant to Marie Curie at th
e Radium Institute. He fell passionately in love with her daughter Irène Curie and convinced him when they married they should take on the name Joliot-Curie as he did on October 4, 1926.
He gave lectures at the Paris Faculty of Science on the atom. That is what he and is what were both working on. They discovered artificial radioactivity and in 1935 they were awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Albert Einstein mentioned Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie in a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of the leading scientists of the nuclear fission in 1937.
After the war in 1945, Joliot-Curie became France’s first High Commissioner for Atomic Energy. He had [passed information onto to the Soviets about nuclear energy. In 1948 the first French atomic reactor was built. He was a devote communist. In 1950 he was absolved of almost all his duties except for professorship at the Collège de France. His wife passed away in 1956.
They had two children, Hélène, born in 1927, who became a physicist, and Pierre, a biologist, born in 1932.
Frédéric Joliot died on August 14, 1958.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Joliot-Curie
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1935/joliot-fred-bio.html
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