The French physicist Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900-1958) discovered artificial radioactivity and the emission of neutrons in nuclear fission.

Frédéric Joliot was born in Paris on March 19, 1900, the youngest of six children whose father had served in the militia of the Paris Commune 30 years earlier. While a student of Paul Langevin at the School of Physics and Chemistry in Paris, he received in 1925 an assistantship at the laboratory of the Radium Institute of Marie Curie, the discoverer of radioactivity. There he met and the next year married Irène Curie, the elder daughter of Madame Curie, who pursued her research at her mother's laboratory, and added his wife's surname to his own.

The union of Irène and Frédéric constituted in the history of science an outstanding example of husband-wife teamwork. Among the 26 papers published...