Irène Joliot-Curie

Died today in 1956 – Irène Joliot-Curie, French physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1897)

Joliot-Curie, the eldest daughter of Marie Curie, won the Nobel with her husband Frederic for creating radioactive elements by bombarding non-radioactive ones with alpha particles. She died at 58 of leukemia, probably from exposure to radiation. This may be the only case of a whole family getting Nobel Prizes. Here’s Irène with her mother in 1925.