Irène Joliot-Curie

Irène Curie was born in Paris on 12 September 1897 to Marie and Pierre Curie, both Nobel laureates, and grew up inside the world's most famous scientific household. In 1935, she and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering induced radioactivity - the ability to synthesize radioactive elements in the lab. The win made them the second married couple to share the prize, after her own parents, and cemented the Curie family's unprecedented five-Nobel haul. A year later she broke new ground in French politics, becoming one of the first three women in government as undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front. In 1945 de Gaulle appointed her one of six commissioners on France's new Atomic Energy Commission. She died in Paris on 17 March 1956 from acute leukemia caused by years of exposure to polonium and X-rays - the same radiation that had defined her family's work.