Timelines
Awards
Jobs/Positions
Educational Accomplishments
Honorary Doctorates
Rosalyn Yalow
Rosalyn Sussman was born July 19, 1921
in the Bronx, New York. In Walton High School she was encouraged to go
into a career in science. After high school she went to Hunter College
and her educational achievements were amazing.
While attending the University of Illinois she met her future husband,
A. Aaron Yalow, a physics student. They were married on June 6, 1943 and
from then to 1950 they had two children, Benjamin and Elanna.
Her first official position was at
the University of Illinois where she was an assistant in physics, she held
that position from 1941 to 1943. From then all the way to now she has had
many exiting
jobs and positions .
In 1950 she started to work as a physicist
and assistant chief in the radioisotope unit of the VA hospital in Bronx
NY. She made a very good friendship with her colleague, S.A. Berson. In
collaboration with Berson, she developed, methods of using radioactive
isotopes to investigate physiological systems that allow detection of very
small concentrations of biological substances in the blood. These methods
are called radioimmunoassay (RIA). RIA is a test that combines the use
of radioactive isotopes with immunology to measure hormones, enzymes, and
other substances that have such low concentrations in the body that they
are impossible to detect with other lab methods.
Yalow and Berson used RIA to show
that adult diabetics didn’t always suffer insufficiency of insulin in their
blood and that an unknown factor must have been blocking the action of
insulin. They also showed that the injected insulin from animals was being
inactivated by the diabetic’s immune system.
RIA wasn’t only used for diabetic
and insulin research. It was used by other physicists to screen blood for
hepatitis in blood banks, find effective dosage levels of drugs and antibiotics,
detect foreign substances in the blood, treat dwarfed children with growth
hormones, test and correct hormone levels in infertile couples, and many
other uses. "RIA made endocrinology one of the hottest fields in medical
research", said Daunta Bois the author of Her Heritage: A Biographical
Encyclopedia of Famous American Women.
After their marvelous development
Yalow and Berson kept working together until Bersons death in 1972. Yalow
renamed her laboratory the Solomon A. Berson Research Laboratory and she
became its director. Yalow kept working and teaching and still is.
Rosalyn Yalow became the second woman
of ever to win the Nobel Prize in medicine, in 1977. That was her most
prominent accomplishment but she won many other awards
over the years. Among all of her awards many colleges have awknowldged
her by ginging her " Honorary Doctorates "
