Rosalyn Yalow life and biography

Rosalyn Yalow, a native from New York City became a notable medical physicist who developed (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique. She was the second woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize Physiology or Medicine after Gerty Cori.

Born in 1921 in the Bronx, New York to Jewish immigrants, Rosalyn Yalow showed early aptitude in mathematics but was later drawn to physics. During the draft years of World War II she was able to gain entrance to previously male-dominated physics graduate program at the University of Illinois. There she worked under the renowned nuclear physicist Maurice Goldhaber, becoming proficient in the construction and use of apparatus for the measurement of radioactive substances.

In the late 1950s Yallow and research partner Dr. Solomon A. Berson created radioimmunoassay (RIA), an analytic radioisotopic technique that allows the quantification of trace amounts of biological substances within bodily fluids. Additionally the research by Yallow and Berson, the first such research done with RIA, discovered previously unknown truths about the reaction between insulin and the immune system. Yalow was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Andrew V. Schally and Roger Guillemin.

RIA is currently used to screen blood for hepatitis virus in blood banks, detect foreign substances in the blood, determine effective dosage levels of drugs and antibiotics, and treat and detect hormone-related health problems.

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