Born in the Bronx, New York City, on July 19, 1921, Rosalyn Sussman attended public schools and graduated with honors from Hunter College in 1941. She pursued graduate studies at the University of Illinois, where she served also as a teaching fellow in physics in the College of Engineering, and in 1945 received a Ph.D. in physics. During that time, in June 1943, she married A. Aaron Yalow, a fellow physics student. From 1946 to 1950 she lectured on physics at Hunter College. From 1947 she was also a consultant in nuclear physics at the Veterans Administration hospital in the Bronx, where research was being conducted on the medical applications of radioactive materials, and in 1950 she became physicist and assistant head of the radioisotope service at the hospital. There, working in collaboration with Dr. Solomon A. Berson, Yalow investigated a number of methods of using radioactive isotopes to analyze physiological systems. Radioactive iodine, for example, was explored as a tool in the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid disorders.
They devoted several years to refining an entirely new analytic technique they called radioimmunoassay, known simply as RIA. The technique combined the use of radioactive isotopes to ╥tag╙ certain hormones or proteins with a sophisticated analytical method based on the stimulation of antibodies and antigenic reactions. Through RIA highly precise measurements of previously undetectable concentrations of hormones, proteins, or other substances present in a sample became possible. The first practical medical result of the new technique came in 1959, when Yalow and Berson discovered that, contrary to common belief, adult diabetics do not always suffer an insufficiency of insulin in the blood; researchers were thus stimulated to seek some unknown factor blocking the action of the insulin. They had earlier confirmed their controversial discovery that therapeutic insulin, commonly obtained from animals was capable of producing an antigenic reaction in the human body and thus being rendered useless. RIA was subsequently applied to other problems of hormone assay, to screen blood in blood banks for hepatitis virus, to assay the effective dosage levels of drugs and antibiotics, to detect suspected but difficult to isolate foreign substances in the blood, and in many other fields.
Yalow was named acting chief of the radioisotope service at the Bronx VA hospital in 1968 and head of the RIA reference laboratory in 1969; she served as chief of the nuclear medicine service from 1970 to 1980. She was a VA senior medical investigator from 1972 to 1992 and was named director of the new Solomon A. Berson Research Laboratory (Dr. Berson had died in 1972) in 1973. She served at the same time as research professor in the department of medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine from 1968 to 1974 and as distinguished service professor from 1974 to 1979. From 1986 she was the Solomon A. Berson distinguished professor at large at Mt. Sinai.. She was awarded the Albert Lasker Prize for Basic Medical Research in 1976, becoming the first woman so honored, and in 1977 she received a half-share of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (the other half was shared by Andrew V. Schally and Roger Guillemin, both of whom had used RIA in their research on brain hormones). She was the second woman, after Gerty T. Cori, to win that prize. She was coeditor of the Hormone and Metabolic Research journal and author of a great many professional papers, articles, and notes. From 1966 she was a member of the President╒s Study Group on Careers for Women. Yalow was a professor at large at Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1979 to 1985, and at the Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center from 1979 to 1985, where she also chairedf the department of clinical science from 1980 to 1985. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1988.
