Iréne Joliot-Curie was born on 12 September 1897 in Paris, France. She was the daughter of Marie Curie and a scientist, like her mother. She is known because she discovered artificial radioactivity and she won a Nobel price because of her discovery. She studied on Collège Sévigné for two years and then onto the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne but her studies were interrupted by the WWI. After the War, Curie returned to Paris to study at the Radium Institute, which had been built by her parents. Curie became Doctor of Science in 1925. During WWII Joliot-Curie got tuberculosis and was forced to spend several years convalescing in Switzerland. To make the situation easier she left her husband and children in France and it was hard to visits back to France, enduring detention by German troops at the Swistzerland border on more than one occasion. Finally, in 1944 Joliot-Curie judged it too dangerous for her family to stay in France and she took her children back to Switzerland. In 1956, after a final convalescent period in the French Alps, Joliot-Curie was admitted to the Curie hospital in Paris, where she died on 17 March at the age of 58 from leukemia.
