Irène Curie was the daughter who first assisted Marie Curie with wartime radiology during World War I.
When war began in 1914, Marie Curie recognized that X-rays could help military surgeons locate bullets and shrapnel before operating. She organized mobile radiography units—vehicles equipped with X-ray machines and generators—that became known as the “Little Curies.”
Irène, then about 17, took a nursing course and joined her mother in the field. She worked as a radiographer, helped operate the equipment, and taught medical personnel how to use radiology to identify projectiles in wounded soldiers. After gaining experience, she worked independently at military facilities and later became her mother’s laboratory assistant at the Radium Institute.
Ève Curie was Marie’s younger daughter, but she was not the daughter associated with the wartime radiology work. Ève later became a writer and biographer, while Irène followed her parents into physics and chemistry and eventually won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.