Rosalyn Yalow

Origins and early life

Rosalyn Sussman was born in New York City on 19 July 1921 and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of Simon Sussman, born on the Lower East Side, and of Clara Zipper, who had come from Germany aged four. She was born into a Jewish family, and after she graduated from Hunter College in January 1941, physics graduate schools turned her down, one admitting that as a Jew and a woman she would never find work in the field.

Work and career

The University of Illinois then offered her a teaching assistantship, and that autumn she became the only woman among the 400 members of its engineering faculty, the first since 1917. There she met Aaron Yalow, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, whom she married in 1943 and with whom she kept a kosher home, and in 1945 she took her doctorate in nuclear physics. In 1947 she joined the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital to set up its radioisotope service, starting from a janitor's closet, and in 1950 began a partnership with the physician Solomon Berson that lasted until Berson's death in 1972.

Studying patients treated with insulin, they found that all of them made antibodies against animal insulin, and turned that reaction into a way of measuring tiny amounts of hormone in the blood: the era of radioimmunoassay, she wrote, began in 1959. The method came to be used for hundreds of substances in thousands of laboratories, yet she and Berson chose not to patent it.

Recognition

In 1976 she was the first woman to receive the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and in 1977 the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, receiving half of it “for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones”, the other half going to Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally. Widowed in 1992 and the mother of two children, she kept working in her laboratory in the Bronx for years after the prize, and died in New York on 30 May 2011, aged 89.