Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Last night I picked up one of my favorite books, Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries, and read the chapter on Rosalyn Sussman Yalow. I've been in a dry reading spell as of late, and I thought at least this way I could get through one chapter of a book that I was familiar with on a woman's life that was sure to be engaging. All the other books on my bookshelf that I've picked up in the last month to read get retired back onto the shelf after only a chapter. (Though I have been listening to an audio book, Small Wonders, of non fiction essays by Barbara Kingsolver as I knit, and that is engaging as well.)

So back to Rosalyn Yalow: Despite the racial (she was Jewish-American) and gender (obviously, female) discrimination that occurred on a regular basis (and kept her from studying at a medical school, which was her original ambition), Rosalyn Yalow was finally accepted to the engineering school at the University of Illinois (it was during World War II and there was a shortage of men to accept into the program, so it was decided that accepting women was better than closing down the school). She received her PhD in nuclear physics in January 1945.

In the mid 1950s, she and her scientific partner Solomon A. Berson developed something called the radioimmunoassay (RIA) procedure. The concept was to use "radioactively tagged substances to measure antibodies produced by the immune system" (345). Later Yalow and Berson discovered that the RIAs could measure "the concentration of hundreds of hormones, enzymes, vitamins, viruses, and drugs within the human body" (347). With this procedure, doctors could diagnose (and sometimes treat) conditions, such as dwarfism, underactive thyroid in newborn babies (which causes retardation), spina bifida in fetuses, diabetes, and infertility. It could also detect drug abuse by athletes and poison in crime victims. Additionally, the procedure made blood transfusions safer because it virtually eliminated the hepatitis virus from North American blood banks. The procedure was revolutionary to the field of endocrinology (and actually started a new field: neuroendocrinology) because small amounts of blood could be evaluated in test tubes without putting the radioactively tagged substances into people's bodies (though now it's all down by computers). Furthermore, the common practice for testing blood of that time (for instance, with diabetes patients) was to draw roughly a cup of plasma for a blood test. The RIA procedure required just a few drops of blood.

A few years after Berson died, Yalow won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1977) for her continued work and contributions with the RIA procedure. She was the first American-born woman to win the Nobel Prize in Science.