YALOW, ROSALYN SUSSMAN

YALOW, ROSALYN SUSSMAN (1921– ), U.S. medical physicist and Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine. Yalow was born in New York and received her B.A. from Hunter College (1941) and M.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Illinois under the direction of Maurice Goldhaber (1945). After teaching at Hunter (1946–50), she started her long association with the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. She set up the radioisotope service over the period 1950–70 and became head of the nuclear medicine service (1970–80), senior medical investigator (1972–92) and director of the Solomon A. Berson Research Laboratory (1973–92). She was also appointed research professor (1968–74) and distinguished service professor (1974–79) in the department of medicine of the affiliated Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Yalow was professor at large at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Yeshiva University (1979–85) and chairperson of the department of clinical science at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx (1980–85). She was professor emeritus from 1985 and Solomon A. Berson Distinguished Professor at Large at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine from 1986. Her collaboration with Solomon Berson began in 1950 and lasted until his death in 1972. They developed the technique of radioimmunoassay which became the standard method of measuring small amounts of peptide hormones and other substances in blood and tissues for research and routine clinical purposes, and they established the basic principles of subsequent immunoassays. Throughout her career she made major contributions to studies of hormones and especially insulin in health and disease. Yalow was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work (1977) jointly with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally. Her other honors include the Gairdner Award (1971), the inaugural Hagedorn Memorial Lecture (1973), membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1975), and the Lasker Award for Basic Medical Science (1976). Yalow was an early advocate and role model for women's right to pursue a career in science. (Michael Denman (2nd ed.)