Dr. Rosalyn Yalow at her Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, October 13, 1977, after learning she was one of three American doctors awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine that year.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was the first American-born woman and the second woman to win, in 1977, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA). This method, which uses radioactive elements to mark biological substances making them visible in human blood even in tiny amounts, changed our understanding of how the immune system responds in patients living with diabetes.
Before RIA development, insulin derived from cows and pigs was used as a treatment for patients living with diabetes. However, for some individuals, this treatment using injections of animal insulin was ineffective. The RIA method showed that those patients had insulin resistance. Their immune system was attacking the hormone as if it were a foreign invasive substance, preventing insulin from entering the cells which remained unable to control blood sugar levels. This discovery led to great progress in type II diabetes studies and revolutionized medicine.
Rosalyn was born on July 19, 1921, in the Bronx, New York, where she spent most of her life. She was the youngest daughter of Clara Zipper and Simon Sussman. Neither of her parents had a high school education, but they were committed to making her and her brother, Alexander, graduate from college. The young girl learned how to read before kindergarten and showed early interest and talent for mathematics and chemistry. She attended Hunter College, a highly competitive tuition-free college for women, becoming Hunter’s first physics major.
Yalow was a pioneer in many aspects. She was determined to be a physicist, but it was unlikely that graduate schools would admit and support women. So, she got a part-time job as a secretary at Columbia University in exchange for classes. When the US joined World War II, many male scientists had to leave their positions to serve in the war. This opened opportunities for women. Rosalyn received an offer to be a teaching assistant as part of her graduate studies in physics at the University of Illinois. Arriving there, she found herself the only woman among its 400 members and the first woman there since 1917. On her first day of graduate school, Rosalyn met Aaron Yalow, a fellow graduate student in physics, who later became her husband. They had two children: Benjamin and Elanna.
She earned her PhD in nuclear physics in 1945 and returned to New York where she worked as the first female assistant engineer at the Federal Telecommunications Laboratory (FTL). One year later, the FTL relocated and she went back to Hunter College to teach physics to returning veterans. Yalow also accepted a part-time job at the Bronx Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital as a consultant and worked in both places simultaneously. During those years, she helped to equip and develop the Radioisotope Service at the VA Hospital from scratch.
In 1950, Yalow left Hunter College and joined the VA Hospital full time. That same year she met Dr. Solomon A. Berson and they started a 22 years partnership that lasted until the day of his death. Together, they developed the RIA method. The first molecule used to test it was insulin for many reasons, including the fact that Yalow’s husband was living with diabetes. Nowadays, the RIA method is used to measure hundreds of biologically active substances, including viruses, drugs, vitamins, and other proteins. Both researchers joined the Department of Medicine of Mount Sinai Hospital where Dr. Berson became the Chair and Rosalyn became a research professor. When Dr. Berson died, she requested to change the name of her laboratory to Solomon A. Berson Research Laboratory, so that his name would still be on her future publications.
Yalow retired from the VA Hospital in 1991 and died on May 30, 2011, in the Bronx, New York.
— Written by Ana de Faria