with the beginning of the 20th century came an explosion of discoveries of what scientists at the time thought were to be new radioactive elements these elements all seemed to Decay into other elements leading to even more discoveries AAS to categorize these new elements between chemists Frederick Saudi and Kashmir Fons led to two critical discoveries in the short years to come the first was the fance Saudi displacement law developed in 1913 independently by the 2 which is a law that predicts the behavior of elements undergoing both Alpha and beta Decay the second is the realization that
these so-called radio elements are not new at all but different versions of already known elements the term isotope was coined shortly after this realization from 1913 on radioactive isotopes were hot topics of study by physicists and chemists everywhere but research was difficult for one main reason availability the only way to get a hold of such Isotopes was to find them naturally through means of digging them up from the ground and extracting them from ores making radioisotopic Metals extremely rare expensive and difficult to obtain this remained a challenge for two decades after the discovery of Isotopes
but the issue was eventually resolved in 1934 at the hands of a husband and wife Duo of French chemists by the names of frederi andin jolio C iren jolio kir was born in Paris in 1897 the daughter of two immeasurably talented scientists Marie and Pierre cirri she was 6 years old when her parents won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the cir name shot into stardom throughout orin's early life though she did not see much of her parents for they were constantly hard at work in the laboratory and she therefore was initially raised mainly by
her paternal grandfather Eugene until she was around 6 years old when she was eight though her father Pierre was unfortunately tragically killed in a horse wagon accident and Marie was left alone to raise irin and her sister Eve Marie saw high potential in irin in mathematics and enrolled her into a small private school that she organized herself this so-called School consisted of six esteemed professors teaching each other's children in their fields of expertise so irin received quite an advanced educ ation at a very young age when the first world war broke out irin spent her
time in mobile field hospitals first with her mother in France and later by herself on the Belgian front during this time an 18-year-old irin used x-rays to locate shrapnel hidden in wounded soldiers' bodies while simultaneously teaching doctors and nurses alongside her how to do the same irin returned to education in 1918 that same year receiving her her borate in mathematics and physics that she was working towards when she was interrupted by the war she immediately began working towards her doctorate as an assistant to her mother at the radium Institute in Paris which by the way
was founded by her parents as she neared the end of her doctorate in 1924 she was asked by her mother to train a new assistant frederique jolio a chemical engineer and recent graduate of the City of Paris industrial physics and chemistry higher educational institution the two fell in love and married in 1926 after both receiving their doctorates from the radium Institute they began working on all their research topics together and they came close to Scientific success multiple times before their big breakthrough upon gaining access to Marie's polonium they conducted a series of experiments bombarding elements
with the radioactive Source the pair was actually the first to successfully detect both the positron and the neutron on in the early 1930s but failed to accurately interpret the results and so credit went to others who replicated the experiments and correctly interpreted the results Carl David Anderson for the positron and James Chadwick for the neutron on the cusp of scientific greatness not once but twice it seemed like the jolio CES were destined to have some sort of Revelation at some point and it finally happened in 1934 early into the year here frederique and Rin used
their polonium source and decided to test its effects on naturally stable substances they tested a number of Light Elements ranging from hydrogen to phosphorus and found some interesting behavior from three specific elements aluminum Boron and magnesium they first made a significant Discovery upon observing aluminum foil after they removed the polonium Source from their setup and found that they still detected positron emission even in the absence of the naturally radioactive material according to the jolio CES the foil itself had become some sort of radioactive product with a halflife of 3 minutes and 15 seconds for their
experiments with Boron and magnesium they noticed similar Behavior the Boron becoming some radioactive product with a halflife of 14 minutes and the Magnesium becoming some radioactive product with a halflife of 2 minutes and 30 seconds at the time they characterized these newly discovered radioactive materials as new radio elements but also noted that these radio elements were more likely to be unstable isotopes of already known elements upon collisions between alpha particles and these three stable elements transmutations would occur that would result in radioactive isotopes with two more protons and three more neutrons than started with a
neutron being ejected immediately upon Collision so Boron would turn into an unstable isotope of nitrogen magnesium I into an unstable isotope of silicon and aluminum into an unstable isotope of phosphorus these unstable Isotopes would then undergo beta Decay emitting positrons and converting a proton in the nucleus into a neutron resulting in stable products carbon 13 aluminum 27 and silicone 30 to test this thesis further they bombarded the chemical compound boron nitride with alpha particles from the polonium and then heated the product with sodium hydroxide also known as costic soda to release gaseous ammonia from this
they found that the radioactive Behavior did not stay with the Boron but rather was carried away with the ammonia suggesting that the new radioactive substance they had created from bombarding Boron was in fact an unstable isotope of nitrogen they underwent a similar type of method to separate aluminum from radioactive phosphorus by dissolving the irradiated aluminum in hydrochloric acid they published their findings on these experiments in nature in February of 1934 to say that the first artificial synthesis of radioisotopes was a big deal as an understatement not only did this have massive implications for research in
particle physics but also in the field of medicine the field of radiotherapy was rather new at this time and doctors were just starting to use radiation as a form of cancer treatment for their patient patients being able to synthesize radioactivity not only vastly sped up the process but also made it much less expensive making it a much more viable option for those struggling with the disease the jolio CES received significant praise for their Discovery and the payer shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1935 in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements the jolio
CES are pillars of scientific history and they discovery that radioactivity can be synthesized not only made research in radioactivity much more feasible but also indirectly saved tons of lives through their impact on biomedical research if you enjoyed this video please consider liking and subscribing click here if you want to see more scientific progress made during this time period thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video
