Frédéric Joliot-Curie was a French nuclear physicist who, together with his wife, Irène Joliot-Curie, discovered artificial radioactivity, for which they received the 1935 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their efforts made nuclear fission and the subsequent development of both nuclear energy and the atomic bomb feasible. Joliot met his wife while working as an assistant at the Radium Institute at the University of Paris. Irène Curie was the daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie, the Nobel Prize laureates who discovered radium and founded the Radium Institute. Irène became Frédéric's lifelong research collaborator and they usually published their findings under the combined form of their last names, Joliot-Curie. After World War II, Frédéric Joliot-Curie brought France into the atomic age as director of France's atomic energy commission.

Jean-Frédéric Joliot...