Irène Joliot-Curie Joliot-Curie was an atheist. Joliot-Curie's daughter, Hélène Langevin-Joliot, is a nuclear physicist and professor at the University of Paris; her son, Pierre Joliot, is a biochemist at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Her name was added to the "Monument to the X-ray and Radium Martyrs of All Nations" erected in Hamburg, Germany. [Category:20th-century women scientists]] Irène Joliot-Curie Irène Joliot-Curie (; 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French and Polish scientist, the daughter of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Marie Curie Jewish. During the French Academy of Sciences elections, she was vilified by the right-wing press as a foreigner and atheist. Her daughter later remarked on the French press' hypocrisy in portraying Curie as an unworthy foreigner when she was nominated for a French honor, but portraying her as a French heroine when she received foreign honors such as her Nobel Prizes. In 1911 it was revealed that in 1910-11 Curie had conducted an affair of about a year's duration with physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of Pierre Curie's, a married man who was estranged from his wife. This resulted