lit a candle 1h agoMy mom called me the minute she saw it, she's the one who always talked about Marie Curie like she was family almost. Didn't know there was a grandson still doing the work right up into his nineties. 94 years old and still carrying that name forward.
Their story
Pierre Joliot was a French biologist whose experiments helped explain how plants turn light into oxygen. He was born in Paris on 12 March 1932 into the most celebrated family in French science. His grandparents were Pierre and Marie Curie, and his parents, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, discovered artificial radioactivity…
Pierre Joliot was a French biologist whose experiments helped explain how plants turn light into oxygen. He was born in Paris on 12 March 1932 into the most celebrated family in French science. His grandparents were Pierre and Marie Curie, and his parents, Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934, when he was two, and shared the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it. The CNRS later described him as the son and grandson of four Nobel laureates who went on to lay his own stone in plant biology.
He grew up mainly in Antony, south of Paris, in the family house later occupied by his sister, the nuclear physicist Hélène Langevin-Joliot. Although he trained as a physical chemist at the Faculty of Science in Paris, he chose biology. His great question, as the Musée Curie put it, was how life turns light or food into energy a cell can use.
Joliot joined the CNRS as a trainee in 1954 and in 1956, aged 24, entered the Institut de biologie physico-chimique (IBPC) in Paris under René Wurmser. His father had just succeeded his late mother at the head of the Curie laboratory at the Radium Institute next door. The IBPC would remain his scientific home for 70 years. He earned a doctorate in physical sciences in 1960, ran a laboratory there from 1963 and became a CNRS director of research in 1974.
His best-known work came in the late 1960s. By firing short flashes of light at photosynthetic cells and measuring the oxygen they released, he showed that oxygen comes out in a rhythm with a period of four. In his own words, four electrons have to be torn one after another from water by photons before a single molecule of oxygen is released. That finding underpins the modern understanding of how photosynthesis splits water. Over the following decades he also studied how light energy travels from antenna pigments to reaction centres, how membrane potentials form, proton pumping in the cytochrome b6f complex, and cyclic electron flow in the leaves of higher plants. He built many of his own instruments, including sensitive oxygen electrodes and flash spectrophotometers, and much of the work was signed jointly with his wife, the biologist Anne Joliot, née Gricouroff.
In 1981 he was appointed to the chair of cellular bioenergetics at the Collège de France, which he held until 2002, while keeping his bench at the IBPC. He directed the biology department of the École normale supérieure from 1987 to 1992, chaired the scientific board of the ENS de Lyon, directed the IBPC from 1994, and served as scientific adviser to the French Prime Minister in 1985 and 1986. From 1998 to 2001 he chaired the CNRS ethics committee, and from 2005 to 2009 he sat on France's national ethics advisory committee.
His honours included the CNRS Gold Medal and election to the French Academy of Sciences in 1982, foreign associate membership of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1979, the Charles F. Kettering Prize in 1970, and membership of Academia Europaea. He was a commander of the Ordre national du Mérite and was raised to grand officer of the Légion d'honneur in 2012.
Joliot was also a public voice for free, curiosity-driven science. In his 2001 book La Recherche passionnément he argued that research must remain a space of freedom and creation, and warned against a drift toward short-term profitability. In 2017 he wrote a book for young readers describing science as a passion, a pleasure and a game. He was a vice-president of the Union rationaliste.
With his sister Hélène he represented the Curie family for decades. He was one of the founders of the Musée Curie and, with Hélène, inaugurated its label as a house of illustrious people in 2013. He travelled to Poland to honour his grandmother's roots, including Warsaw and Lublin, and the museum said he was still at his laboratory bench until a few months before his death.
Pierre Joliot died in the night of 9 to 10 October 2026, aged 94. He was survived by his wife Anne, their sons Marc and Alain, both research directors, and his sister Hélène. The place and cause of death were not made public.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (EN, FR); Musée Curie; CNRS; Collège de France; Académie des sciences; Le Monde; Odile Jacob; L'Humanité. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“Four electrons have to be torn successively from the water molecule by photons for one molecule of oxygen to be emitted.”
Describing his late-1960s photosynthesis discovery, as quoted by the CNRS (translated from French)
“I am convinced that research, seen as a space of freedom and creation, still has a bright future. It must remain a land of play and adventure where a taste for risk and dissent can be expressed.”
La Recherche passionnément, 2001 (translated from French)
“My conception of research was deeply marked by my upbringing in a family where it was practised by two successive generations, my grandparents, Pierre and Marie Curie, then my parents, Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie.”
Opening of La Recherche passionnément, 2001 (translated from French)
“A permanent confrontation between theory and experiment is a necessary condition for the expression of creativity.”
La Recherche passionnément, 2001 (translated from French)
“Under the pretext of improving its efficiency, fundamental research is increasingly subjected to an obligation of short-term results that can end up sterilising it.”
Interview with L'Humanité (translated from French)
Photos
1Pierre Joliot at the IBPC, October 2021
Oct 2021 · by People Forever
my grandmother was the same way about Curie, it's a different kind of legacy