Irene Joliot-Curie (1897-1956), French nuclear physicist. Irene was the daughter of the famous nuclear physicist Marie Curie. She worked with her mother at the Radium Institute in Paris from 1918, where she met, and later married, Frederic Joliot, her mother's assistant. She worked with her husband on artificial radioactivity, making the first artificial radio-element. They shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935. Irene died of leukemia, probably caused by a lifetime of exposure to cancer-causing radiation.