Descendant of 4 Nobelists Discusses Women in Science

Physicist Helene Langevin-Joliot has been long concerned about the relatively small number of women in her field.

And she is especially well qualified to offer an opinion on the subject. Her family boasts four Nobel laureates, including two women. One of them, Langevin-Joliot’s grandmother, was one of the most famous scientists of all time, Marie Curie.

“In college, women major in the behavioral sciences, like psychology and sociology,” Langevin-Joliot, 70, told a Cal State Northridge audience on Thursday. She was there to take part in the school’s Distinguished Visiting Speakers program.

Langevin-Joliot told the crowd that currently there is a shortage of math teachers in her home country of France, as well as in the United States. This affects women students more profoundly because of what she called the “cultural and social” biases against them entering fields such as physics and chemistry.

“We don’t need to fear new technology, but it’s important that we have men and women who can understand it,” she said. “I believe that science education is as important in the 21st century as reading and writing was in this century.”

Langevin-Joliot obtained doctorates in nuclear physics and chemistry from the College de France in Paris. She has taught at the Institute of Nuclear Physics at the University of Paris since 1957 and is an advisor to the French Parliament.

Her grandparents Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the radioactive elements radium and polonium in 1898 and won Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry in 1903 and 1911. Langevin-Joliot’s parents, Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935.