Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman (1921-), an American medical physicist, helped develop a highly sensitive medical test called radioimmunoassay (RIA) that is used to examine human blood and tissue for disease. The RIA “tags” substances in the blood with a radioactive label, so that even tiny quantities of an antigen, such as bacteria or a toxin, can be detected and measured. Yalow and Solomon A. Berson first used this process in 1959 to study insulin concentration in the blood of diabetics. Yalow shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with French-born American physiologist Roger Charles Guillemin and American biochemist Andrew Victor Schally .
Rosalyn Sussman was born July 19, 1921, in New York City and lived there nearly her entire life. Her mother was Clara (Zipper) Sussman, who had immigrated from Germany at age 4, and her father was Simon Sussman, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York and who ran a small business. Neither of Rosalyn's parents had very much formal education, but Rosalyn read books before she was old enough for kindergarten. Her only brother took her to the library for books. In junior high and high school, Yalow became interested in mathematics and chemistry. She went on to Hunter College in New York City, then a women's college and now a part of City University of New York. There she became interested in physics, inspired by several of her professors and by the major advances being made in the field in the early decades of the 1900's.
After she received her bachelor's degree from Hunter in 1941, her family wanted her to be a grade school teacher. As a woman, her chances for a graduate degree in physics were slim. However, with encouragement from her physics professors at Hunter, she applied at several schools. She accepted an offer of a teaching assistantship in physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the most prestigious school she had applied to. At the university's College of Engineering, she found herself the only woman among its 400 faculty members. She worked hard and endured some discrimination that was common to women science students of her day.
On the first day of graduate school, she met Aaron Yalow, who was also a graduate student in physics. He was the son of a rabbi from upstate New York. They were married in 1943
The bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, brought the United States into World War II (1939–1945). Physics faculty members were leaving their positions for secret scientific duties, and there was an influx of young military students. Yalow carried a heavy load, teaching, taking graduate courses, and spending long hours in the laboratory. In 1945, she received a Ph.D. degree in nuclear physics. She was only the second woman at the University of Illinois to earn a Ph.D. degree in physics.
Yalow returned to New York and took a position as assistant engineer at Federal Telecommunications Laboratory, a research laboratory for International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). She was the laboratory's only woman engineer. She also taught physics at Hunter College. In 1947, she was appointed as a consultant in nuclear physics at the Bronx Veterans Administration (VA) Hospital in New York City, while she continued to teach full-time.
It was at the VA hospital that Yalow would make her great contributions to medicine. She worked on a research program to explore the use of radioactive substances in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. From her research in nuclear physics, she had become skilled in creating and using diagnostic techniques and equipment for the measurement of radioactive substances.
In 1950, she resigned from Hunter and joined the VA full-time as assistant chief of the radioisotope service. Solomon A. Berson, a doctor completing his residency in internal medicine, joined her that year, and Yalow and Berson entered into a dynamic, productive partnership that lasted 22 years until Berson died in 1972.
Yalow and Berson's earliest studies together involved the use of radioactive isotopes, or radioisotopes, to analyze blood for evidence of certain diseases. A radioactive atom is one in which the nucleus has changed. When a nucleus changes, it gives off radiation consisting of alpha or beta particles or gamma rays. Isotopes are atoms that have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. Hydrogen, for example, has three isotopes. Some atoms are naturally radioactive, but physicists can create radioactive isotopes of nearly all elements in a laboratory by bombarding atoms with subatomic particles.
Yalow and Berson used such radioisotopes to diagnose thyroid diseases and to observe iodine metabolism. They also observed the protein distribution inglobin, which is the protein in hemoglobin, and serum protein. Serum is the clear, fluid part of the blood. They soon began studying insulin, a hormone that is produced in the pancreas and enables the body to use and store glucose quickly. People with Type I diabetes, also known as insulin-dependent diabetes or juvenile diabetes, lack insulin. Yalow and Berson chose insulin because it was the hormone most available in a highly purified form.
In studying the reaction of insulin with antibodies, Yalow and Berson realized that they had developed a tool with the potential for measuring insulin in the blood of certain diabeties. They published their new process, radioimmunoassay, in 1959. As they continued to find more uses for RIA, more scientists began to see its outstanding potential. Today, RIA is used to measure hundreds of substances in laboratories all over the world. It remains a highly sensitive and very specific laboratory assay (test). RIA can be used to measure the levels of antibodies in a person's body, or to measure any substance against which an antibody can be produced. RIA has become a tool for screening blood in blood banks, and for doctors to detect drugs in a patient's system. It has even been used to measure such substances as heroin, LSD, or other abused drugs in the blood.
Through their years as a research pair, Berson and Yalow mentored and trained many young researchers. The VA hospital became affiliated with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and in 1968 Yalow was appointed research professor at Mount Sinai. After Berson's death, Yalow had their laboratory renamed the Solomon A. Berson Research Laboratory. In 1973, she became director of the laboratory.
Yalow became the second woman ever to achieve the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine when she won the award in 1977 “for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones.” Guillemin and Schally won “for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain,” in which they used RIA. Guillemin was responsible for many discoveries about hormones originating in the hypothalamus, a lower part of the brain. Schally's research was also conducted on the hormones produced by the hypothalamus. He artificially produced the hormones TRH (thyrotropine-releasing hormone) and LH-RH (luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone) and then examined them in isolation.
Among the many other honors Yalow has held are membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the Scientific Achievement Award of the American Medical Association, and the American College of Physicians Award for distinguished contributions in science as related to medicine. In 1976, she became the first woman ever to win the Albert Lasker Prize for Basic Medical Research. She has received more than 45 honorary doctorates. She has served on several government committees and was coeditor of the journal Hormone and Metabolic Research .