Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow is a Jewish medical physicist and a Nobel Prize winner. She was born July 19, 1921 in Bronx, New York, USA. She graduated with honors in Physics and Chemistry from Hunter College in New York, New York, in 1941. She then recieved a teaching assistance-ship in physics at the University of Illinois, and in 1945, recieved her Ph.D in nuclear physics. There she met and married A. Aaron Yalow, who was also a physics student at the university. In 1946 she left the university of Illinois and taught physics at Hunter College until 1950. Also, in 1947 she became a consultant in nuclear physics at the Veterans Administration Hospital, where she studied medical applications of radioactive materials. This is where she met Dr. Soloman A. Berson.

Rosalyn and Soloman created a new technique called radioimmunoassay, or the RIA, “which allowed quantifying very small amounts of biological substances in body fluids using radioactive-labeled material.” They made it possible for doctors to diagnose conditions caused by very small changes in hormone levels. In 1959 they used radioimmunoassay to show that adult diabetics did not always have low insulin in their blood, and something else must be causing the lack of insulin. They also used RIA to screen blood for hepatitis virus in blood banks, to determine effective dosage levels of drugs and antibiotics, to detect foreign substances in the blood, to treat midget children with growth hormones, and in many other fields. In 1968, Rosalyn Sussman Yalow became head of the radioisotope service at the Veterans Administration hospital and in 1969 she was named the head of the RIA reference laboratory. From 1970 to 1980, she was the chief of the nuclear medicine service. Dr. Soloman A. Berson died in 1972, and Rosalyn renamed her laboratory the Soloman A. Berson Research Laboratory and she became its director in his place. She received many medical awards.

Rosalyn was a research professor at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine from 1968 to 1974, a service professor from 1974 to 1979, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1975. In 1976, she was the first woman to be awarded the Albert Lasker Prize for medical research. Then in 1977, she shared the Nobel Prize in medicine “for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones.”

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow retired from the Veterans Administration Hospital in 1991. She is using her time, as a Nobel Prize winner, to try and get better science education, better child care and other causes. She is still alive and living in New York today.