physical chemist, b. 19 March 1900 (Paris, France), d. 14 August 1958 (Arcouest)
Frédéric Joliot's father was a merchant. The young Frédéric attended the Lycée Lakanal as a boarding student until a change in the family's financial situation forced him to continue his education at a free public school. He passed the entrance exam for the École de Physique et Chimie Industrielle and graduated from it as the best of his class with a degree in engineering.
Having completed his military service Joliot received a research scholarship. In 1925 Marie Curie appointed him as her assistant. The following year Joliot married Marie Curie's daughter Irène and took the name Joliot-Curie.
In 1927 Joliot began new studies to obtain a Ph.D., which he obtained in 1930 with a thesis on the electrochemistry of radio-elements. With the help of his wife he improved his laboratory techniques, and to augment their income he lectured at the École d'Électricité Industrielle Charliat. In 1935 he became lecturer in the Faculty of Science of the University of Paris. In 1937 he was nominated Professor at the Collège de France, where he had a new laboratory built that included a cyclotron of seven million electronvolts, the first in Western Europe.
Joliot's interest throughout his career was the production of energy from nuclear fission. In 1934 the Joliot-Curies, who from 1928 worked and published together, discovered artificial radioactivity. By bombarding boron, aluminium, and magnesium with alpha particles, they produced isotopes of the normally stable elements nitrogen, phosphorus, silicon and aluminium that decompose spontaneously, with a more or less long period, by emission of positive or negative electrons. The following year they received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work.
By 1940 Joliot had taken out five patents related to the production of energy from nuclear fission. The rise of National Socialism in Germany had caused him to take an active interest in social affairs - he had become a member of the Socialist Party in 1934, the Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes (Vigilance Committee of Anti-fascist Intellectuals) in 1935 and in the League for the Rights of Man in 1936 -, and when German troops advanced on Paris in 1940 he organized the transfer of all the documents and materials relating to his work to England and joined the French Resistance.
Given the conditions of war against fascism the Curies decided to cease work on nuclear fission. In 1939 they deposited a paper on the principles of a nuclear reactor in a sealed envelope at the Académie des Sciences (it was not opened until 1949) and changed direction towards biological and medical applications. Joliot and his colleague Antoine Lacassagne demonstrated the use of radioactive iodine as a tracer in the thyroid gland, and in 1943 Joliot became a member of the Académie de Médecine.
After the occupation of Paris by German troops Joliot participated in the founding of the National Front committee in 1941 and became its president. In 1942 he joined the Communist Party (PCF). By forming the Société d'Etudes des Applications des Radio-éléments Artificiels (Society for the Study of Applications of Artificial Radio-elements), which gave work certificates to nuclear scientists, he prevented the deportation of the French nuclear science community to laboratories in Germany. Towards the end of the war he lived in Paris under the name Jean-Pierre Gaument. His laboratory served as a weapons arsenal during the liberation of Paris.
Immediately after the war Joliot was appointed Director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research); in 1946 he became the first High Commissioner for Atomic Energy. Again in close collaboration with his wife, Joliot supervised the construction of the first French nuclear reactor; it came on line on 15 December 1948. Less than two years later Joliot was removed from his position as High Commissioner on account of his membership in the Communist Party.
The Joliot-Curies continued their research and political activities without government support or approval. Both remained active in the peace movement. Joliot was elected President of the World Peace Council. In 1956 he became a member of the Central Committee of the PCF. After Irène's death in the same year he became her successor in the Chair of Nuclear Physics at the University of Paris, while still retaining his professorship at the Collège de France.
Joliot received many honours for his work in science and his engagement for social progress. He held honorary doctor's degrees from several universities. The French Republic made him a commander of the Legion of Honour and bestowed on him the Croix de Guerre. On 15 August 1958 the French newspaper Le Monde reported in its obituary that "the distinguished physicist and hero will be honoured by a full state funeral in Paris."
Encyclopaedia Britannica 15th ed. (1995) Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie.
Nobel e-Museum, the Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation (2004) Frédéric Joliot. http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1935/joliot-bio.html (accessed 29 July 2004); based on Nobel Lectures. Chemistry1922-1941, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1966.