Hélène Langevin-Joliot visited today the LHCb detector cavern during a short LHC Technical Stop (left image). She is the Emeritus Research Director in Fundamental Nuclear Physics at CNRS in Orsay (France), and is the daughter of Frédéric and Irène Joliot-Curie (Nobel laureates for Chemistry in 1935) and granddaughter of Pierre Curie (Nobel laureate for Physics in 1903) and Marie Curie (Nobel laureate for Physics in 1903 and for Chemistry in 1911). During her visit to CERN she gave a lecture at the Globe of Science and Innovation entitled “Marie Curie, women and science, then and now”. A special musical performance was given in Thoiry, a nearby village to CERN, where she discussed the photograph shown here (right image).
The photo was taken in Thoiry in 1930, in front of the Hôtel Léger, during what we now call a conference dinner and included both Marie Curie and Albert Einstein. They were both members of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory organization for the League of Nations which aimed to promote international exchange between scientists, researchers, teachers, artists and intellectuals. The committee went for dinner to the then famous restaurant in Thoiry on 25/7/1930 during its annual meeting. After World War II, the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations and the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation was a forerunner of UNESCO. An intergovernmental meeting of UNESCO in Paris in December 1951 led to the creation of the European Council for Nuclear Research, which was responsible for establishing the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1954.