Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman


Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman,

1921–2011, American medical physicist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Univ. of Illinois, 1945. As a researcher at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital (from 1947), Yalow and colleague Solomon A. Berson developed a process, called radioimmunoassayradioimmunoassay
(RIA), highly sensitive laboratory technique used to measure minute amounts of substances including antigens, hormones, and drugs present in the body. The substance or antigen (a foreign substance in the body that causes antibody production) to be measured is
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, that made it possible to detect mere traces of biological substances in blood and other fluids. Their laboratory used the technique to make a number of discoveries concerning diabetes and insulin as well as other findings. For her work, Yalow was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Andrew V. SchallySchally, Andrew V.,
1926–, American endocrinologist, b. Wilno, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania), as Andrzej Viktor Schally, grad. McGill Univ. (Ph.D., 1957). He spent most of his career at Tulane Univ.
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 and Roger GuilleminGuillemin, Roger Charles Louis
, 1924–, French-American physiologist, b. Dijon, France. Educated in France, he fought for the resistance during World War II. He taught primarily at Baylor Univ.
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. Yalow also was a professor at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, from 1968 until her death.

Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman

 

Born July 19, 1921, in New York. American medical physicist.

Yalow graduated from Hunter College in 1941. She was an assistant professor of physics at the college from 1946 to 1950, when she was appointed a physicist and assistant chief of the radioisotope service at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. In 1970 she was named chief of the hospital’s nuclear medicine service. Yalow concurrently served as a consultant for the Lenox Hill Hospital from 1956 to 1962, and she was named a professor at a medical school in 1968.

Yalow’s principal works deal with the use of radioimmunoassay to determine the levels of insulin, parathyroid hormone, gastrin, and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) in the blood and the tissues of the endocrine glands.

Yalow shared a Nobel Prize in 1977 with R. Guillemin and A. V. Schally.