The Radioactivists

Isabelle Archinard b. 27 February 1903 in Troinex, Switzerland; d. 28 April 1995 at a Catholic old-age home in Carouge, near Geneva.

Antoine-Henri Becquerel b. 15 December 1852 in Paris; d. 25 August 1908 in Le Croisic, of a heart attack.

Marietta Blau b. 29 April 1894 in Vienna; displaced as a Jew during World War II, she escaped to Oslo (thanks to Ellen Gleditsch), to Mexico (aided by Albert Einstein), and then to the United States, where she held numerous positions in industry, on college faculties, and at research facilities, including the Atomic Energy Commission’s Brookhaven National Laboratory; d. 27 January 1970 in Vienna, ten years after her return to Europe.

Bertram Borden Boltwood b. 27 July 1870 in Amherst, Massachusetts; d. 15 August 1927 at his summer home in Hancock, Maine, by suicide.

Harriet Brooks b. 2 July 1876 in Exeter, Ontario; m. Frank Pitcher 1907; d. 17 April 1933 in Montreal, after a long but unspecified illness. An obituary written by Ernest Rutherford and published in Nature recalled how well known she had been in the years 1901 to 1905 “for her contributions to the then youthful science of radioactivity.”

Catherine Chamié b. 13 November 1888 in Odessa; d. 14 July 1950 in Paris, after a thirty-year career of research and metrology at the Institut du Radium.

Sonia Slobodkine Cotelle b. 13 June 1896 in Warsaw; d. 18 January 1945 in Paris, of aplastic anemia.

Irène Curie b. 12 September 1897 in Paris; m. Frédéric Joliot 9 October 1926; d. 17 March 1956, in Paris, of radiation-induced leukemia.

Marie Sklodowska Curie b. 7 November 1867 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Empire; d. 4 July 1934, at Sancellemoz Sanitarium in Haute-Savoie, France, of aplastic anemia.

Maurice Curie b. 12 October 1888 in Paris; m. Raymonde Simonin; became professor of physics at the Sorbonne Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology; d. 2 September 1975 at Bourg-la-Reine.

Pierre Curie b. 15 May 1859 in Paris; d. 19 April 1906 of a traumatic injury on a Paris street.

Jacques Danne b. 1882 in Paris; served as founding editor of Le Radium; d. 8 March 1919 in Paris of a sudden illness.

André-Louis Debierne b. 14 July 1874 in Paris; d. 31 August 1949, in Paris, of lung cancer.

Alicja Dorabialska b. 14 October 1897 in Sosnowiec, part of Russian Poland; d. 7 August 1975, in Warsaw, where she is buried near the symbolic memorial she dedicated to colleagues killed in World War II:

Here the dead lie alive

in this grave of chemists, whose ashes

were scattered by the enemy during the years 1939–45

and did not find a place of silence in a Polish cemetery.

Renée Galabert b. 28 May 1894 in Chartres; headed the Measurement Service in the Laboratoire Curie from 1921 to 1933; d. 29 August 1956, in a Paris hospital, of leukemia.

Ellen Gleditsch b. 29 December 1879 in Mandal, Norway; received the first Sorbonne honorary doctorate ever awarded to a woman in 1962, when she was recognized as the “oldest living pioneer of nuclear-physical and chemical research”; d. 5 June 1968, at her country home in Enebakk, of a stroke.

Irén Götz b. 3 April 1889 in Mosonmagyaróvár, a village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; m. radical activist László Dienes 1913; d. 1941 in Moscow, of typhus contracted during a brief political imprisonment.

Otto Hahn b. 8 March 1879 in Frankfurt; m. Edith Junghans in 1913; d. 28 July 1968, in Göttingen.

Frédéric Joliot b. 19 March 1900 in Paris; m. Irène Curie in 1926; d. 14 August 1958, in Paris, of liver disease attributed to radiation exposure.

Antonia Korvezee b. 8 March 1899 in Wijnaldum, the Netherlands; d. 17 January 1978 in Delft, the city where she taught radioactivity for two decades and was elected the first female professor at its Institute of Technology.

Jeanne Ferrier Lattès b. 6 April 1888 in Montpellier; collaborated with researchers at the Pavillon Pasteur on the use of radioelements in cancer detection and earned her doctoral degree in 1926; m. Georges Fournier, her lab partner, in 1929; d. 1979 in Paris.

May Sybil Leslie b. 14 August 1887 in Woodlesford, West Yorkshire; m. chemist Alfred Hamilton-Burr in 1923; d. 3 July 1937 in Bardsley.

Wilhelmina Lub b. 16 March 1900 in Enkhuizen, the Netherlands; determined the spectrum of actinium; d. 23 December 1986 in Enkhuizen.

Stefania Maracineanu b. 18 June 1882 in Bucharest; d. 15 August 1944, of cancer, in her native city.

Branca Edmée Marques b. 14 April 1899 in Lisbon; m. António Sousa Torres 1925; d. 19 July 1986, twenty years after becoming, at age sixty-seven, the first woman in Portugal to gain a tenured professorship on a university science faculty.

Lise Meitner b. 7 November 1878 in Vienna; partnered professionally with chemist Otto Hahn at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin but was forced to emigrate to Sweden in 1938 because of her Jewish heritage; d. 27 October 1968 in Cambridge, England.

Stefan Meyer b. 27 April 1872 in Vienna; m. Emilie Therese Maass in 1910; d. 29 December 1949 at Bad Ischl, Austria, of a heart attack.

Madeleine Monin b. 3 April 1898 in Le Mans; m. Henri Molinier 24 April 1919 and had two daughters; later trained as a nurse, she was cited by the French Red Cross for care of the wounded during World War II; d. 27 November 1976.

Éliane Montel b. 9 October 1898 near Montpellier; never married but had a child in 1933 with Paul Langevin; d. 24 January 1993 in Paris, having outlived her son, a respected musicologist, by six years.

Marguerite Perey b. 19 October 1909 in Villemomble, a suburb of Paris; became the first woman admitted to the Académie des Sciences; d. 13 May 1975 at a clinic in Louveciennes, near Versailles, of metastasized cancer.

Angèle Pompéï b. 4 February 1898, on the island of Corsica; d. 13 February 1999 (age 101) in Marseilles.

Eva Julia Ramstedt b. 15 September 1879 in Stockholm; d. there on 11 September 1974.

Erzsébet Róna b. 20 March 1890 in Budapest, where she earned a doctorate in chemistry in 1921; worked with nearly all radioactivity pioneers, including Ellen Gleditsch, who found her a haven at Oslo when Hitler’s advance forced Jews out of Vienna; having relocated to the United States in 1941, she worked on the Manhattan Project and at both the Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories; d. 1981 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at age ninety-one.

Ernest Rutherford b. 30 August 1871 at Brightwater, near Nelson, New Zealand; m. Mary Georgina Newton of Christchurch in 1900; d. 19 October 1937 in Cambridge, England, following surgery for a strangulated hernia, his ashes interred at Westminster Abbey.

Frederick Soddy b. 2 September 1877 at Eastbourne, Sussex, England; m. Winifred Moller Beilby in 1908; awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; d. 22 September 1956, at Brighton, broken-hearted after the death of his wife.

Jadwiga Szmidt b. 8 September 1889 in Lodz (then a Polish enclave in the Russian Empire); m. physicist A. A. Tshernyshev in St. Petersburg in 1923; d. April 1940 (exact date unknown) in Leningrad.

Margaret von Wrangell b. 7 January 1877 in Moscow; m. Vladimir Andronikov in 1928; d. 21 March 1932 in Hohenheim, Germany.

Their Families and Associates

Émile Armet de Lisle (head of the Sels de Radium factory) b. 28 June 1853 in Nogent-sur-Marne; d. 11 December 1928 in Paris.

Antoine Béclère (Marie’s medical colleague and founder of radiology) b. 17 March 1856, Paris; m. Cécile Vieillard-Baron 20 July 1887; d. 24 February 1939 in Paris, of a heart attack.

Eugène Curie (Pierre’s father) b. 28 August 1827 in Mulhouse, France; m. Sophie-Claire Depouilly; d. 25 February 1910 in Sceaux.

Jacques Curie (Pierre’s brother and Maurice’s father) b. 29 October 1855 in Paris; m. Marie Masson; d. 19 February 1941 in Montpellier.

Bronislawa Sklodowska Dluska (Marie’s sister) b. 28 March 1865 in Warsaw; m. Kazimierz Dluski in 1890, the year she received her medical degree; d. 15 April 1939 in Warsaw.

Hélène Joliot (Marie’s granddaughter) b. 19 September 1927; pursued a distinguished career as a nuclear physicist, Sorbonne professor, and director at the French National Center for Scientific Research; m. Michel Langevin (Paul’s grandson), had two children, and is still very much alive at this writing.

Pierre Joliot (Marie’s grandson) b. 12 March 1932; m. biologist Anne Gricouroff; became a biophysicist, won election to the Académie des Sciences, and held the Chair of Cellular Bioenergetics for twenty years at the Collège de France, before gaining his present title of professor emeritus.

Ève Curie Labouisse (daughter of Marie and Pierre) b. 6 December 1904 in Paris; m. Henry Richardson Labouisse Jr. in 1954; d. 22 October 2007 (age 102), at her home in New York City.

Paul Langevin (student of Pierre, colleague and confidant of Marie) b. 23 January 1872 in Paris; arrested for Résistance activities during the Second World War; d. 19 December 1946 in Paris and memorialized in the Panthéon for his contributions to relativity, quantum mechanics, and sonar.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (chair of the first five Solvay Councils) b. 18 July 1853 in Arnhem, the Netherlands; shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman; d. 4 February 1928, in Haarlem.

Claudius Regaud (Marie’s colleague and director of the Pavillon Pasteur) b. 30 January 1870 in Lyon; m. pianist Marie Croizet in 1898; d. 28 December 1940 in Couzon-au-Mont-d’Or.

Bronislawa Boguska Sklodowska (Marie’s mother) birthdate unknown; d. 9 May 1878, in Warsaw, of tuberculosis.

Józef Sklodowski (Marie’s brother) b. 1863 in Warsaw; m. Jadwiga Kamienska; d. 19 October 1937 in Warsaw.

Wladyslaw Sklodowski (Marie’s father) b. 20 October 1832 in Kielce, a staunchly Polish city in the Russian Empire; d. 14 May 1902, following gall bladder surgery, in Warsaw.

Zofia Sklodowska (Marie’s sister) b. 1 August 1861 in Warsaw; d. of typhus 1 January 1876 at age fourteen.

Helena Sklodowska Szalay (Marie’s sister) b. 20 April 1866 in Warsaw; m. Stanislas Szalay in 1896, served as a school inspector and continued teaching till age eighty; d. 6 February 1961.