Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, linocut print, 9.25" 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

For the 10th #PrinterSolstice2526 prompt 'fraction' I made the portrait of the woman who taught us how to measure the fraction, or concentration of many things, like antigens like hormones to drugs to within our blood, and to diagnose and monitor related diseases, medical physicist and Nobel laureate Rosalyn Sussman Yalow. 

Rosalyn Yalow (née Sussman, 1921-2011) was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx during the Great Depression and attended Walton High School. Her parents had not had the opportunity to attend high school, but valued education and encouraged their children, Rosalyn and Alexander, to read books from the local library. Like Esther Lederberg, she got the opportunity for higher education at the all-female Hunter College, tuition-free. Her mother hoped she would become a teacher but Rosalyn opted to study physics.  She read Eve Curie's biography of her mother, double-Nobel laureate Marie Skłodowska-Curie, and Rosalyn got excited about nuclear physics. A lecture by Enrico Fermi in 1939, on nuclear fission, newly discovered by Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, captured her imagination. So, she became Hunter College's first physics major and even graduated early with honours. Money was tight, and opportunities for graduate school for a young Jewish woman were few, so she got herself a secretary to a biochemist at Columbia University, Dr. Rudolf Schoenheimer (who developed a technique of isotope labelling of biomolecules). She thought eventually she might go to graduate school at Columbia. She graduated Hunter College in 1941 She did not think that as a woman, she could get financial support for graduate school as she found a second secretary job. Columbia immunologist Dr. Michael Heidelberger hired her on condition that she study stenography. When the US joined WWII, suddenly there was more opportunity for women. Many male physics grad students were drafted or being sent to do secret wartime research and universities decided was better to admit women students, as men were otherwise occupied, than to have to close their doors. She was offered a teaching assistant position in the college of engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she was the first woman since 1917 and the only woman among 400 members. There were no women's washrooms, a real inconvenience when working late in the lab. She took extra undergraduate courses in physics to fill in gaps in her education. She was ambitious, and assertive and felt disapproval, particularly from other women, for not taking up teaching, the socially acceptable role for a woman at the time. She married fellow physics student, Aaron Yalow, the son of a rabbi in 1943. She learned how to build her own equipment and measure and work with radioactive substances.  She earned her PhD in 1945, then took further tuition-free physics back home in New York, under government auspices at New York University. 

Aaron knew he was not marrying a housewife, and supported her pursuing her career in physics, but he did not, on the other hand, help around the house. She valued the traditional roles of wife and mother. Her parents had not kept a kosher home, but she did for Aaron and later, their two children, Benjamin and Alanna. If Rosalyn had to travel, she would prepare his meals in advance, for him to warm up. Rather than the more modern ideas of work-life balance, Rosalyn's solution was simply to stint on sleep. Like many in her generation she was a bit wary of feminism and feminist organizations, placing a high priority on the role of wife and mother. She worried feminism lead women to eschew traditional duties. Conversely she advocated for more women in science and served as a loyal and dedicated role-model and mentor to younger women. She wrote, "The world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half its people if we are to solve the many problems which beset us." But, she did not want women in science to be treated differently from men so she disapproved of organizations for women in science. She recognized that WWII had created opportunities for women, but suggested that if the numbers of women decreased post-war, perhaps they were simply not interested. Nonetheless, she devoted her retirement years to advocating for better-quality child care and science education, aware that these could both make a significant positive impact on women's participation in science.

After grad school, Rosalyn got a job as an assistant electrical engineer at the Federal Telecomminations Laboratory, where she was the only woman. In 1946 she returned to Hunter College, where she taught physics. In 1947, Aaron introduced her to Columbia University medical physics Edith Quimby, who used radioactive isotopes. She asked to volunteer in Quimby's lab, anxious to get back into research; Quimby instead introduced her to influential medical physicist Gioacchino Failla. Failla immediately called the VA Hospital in the Bronx and got her a part-time job as a researcher there, to set up their Radioisotope Services. She set up a lab in an old janitor's closet, often building her own equipment, as the field was so new. She split her time between working in the lab and as a physics lecturer until 1950, because she wanted to keep mentoring students. One especially promising student had caught her attention: Mildred Spiewak (later the "Queen of Carbon Science" Dresselhaus), whom she persuaded to apply to graduate school for physics, rather than teacher's college. Rosalyn remained an active mentor to Millie through her career. 

Rosalyn Yalow with her research partner Solomon Berson, when she won the 1961 Ely Lilly Award of the American Diabetes Association. (via here)

The Veterans Association wanted to institute a research program on the medical uses of radioactivity, and by 1950, Yalow had equipped a radioisotope lab at the Bronx VA Hospital and she left teaching for research. There she met her longtime collaborator, physician Solomon Berson. He had already accepted a job with the VA Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, but after interviewing Rosalyn, they hit it off famously, and he changed his plans. Each happily married to someone else, they became "work spouses," an inseparable, complementary pair, in the lab for 22 years, using radioactive isotopes to study the human body. Sol taught Rosalyn immunology and Rosalyn taught Sol about radioactivity.

She wrote, "The only difference between men and women in science is that women have the babies. This makes it more difficult for women in science but, ... it is merely another challenge to overcome." The VA policy was that once women employees reached their fifth month of pregnancy, they had to leave, so, when expecting her children, she ignored the policy and deliberately neglected to inform the VA.

Rosalyn and Sol were interested in what happens to the insulin diabetics injected to allow them metabolize sugars. Rosalyn had a personal reason for her interest in addition to their scientific reasons; Aaron was diabetic. So they labelled insulin by adding a radioactive isotope of iodine, so they could follow the insulin in patients' bodies by the location of the radiation. Was the insulin being broken down by the body and passed through urine? To their surprise, diabetics who had been injecting insulin for some time, were retaining the insulin longer than health patients (themselves included amongst their healthy subjects). The insulin was being produced by cattle, and it was quite similar, but not identical to human insulin. They realized that the diabetics' bodies were detecting a foreign substance and producing an immune response to the cattle insulin, which was why it was processed more slowly and remaining in their bodies, but it also meant it was becoming less effective. These patients needed human insulin, and thus we now produce insulin which is identical to that naturally produced in healthy humans. 

They realized they could flip their method around to measure the insulin in blood. If they mixed a patient's blood with a mixture of radioactively tagged insulin and natural antibodies the antibodies would then pair with the tagged or patient insulin. Since the antibodies prefer the nonradioactive version of the insulin (or any other hormone they wanted to measure in this way), gradually, they separate from their radioactive partners and pair with the natural hormone. Then, they could separate all the hormone-antibody pairs (whether radioactive or not) and measure the radioactivity of the mixture. The difference between the radioactivity of the mixture from the original sample of tagged samples is a measure, or assay, of the amount of hormone in the blood sample naturally. Suddenly, rather than 100 cubic centimetres of blood, a diabetic patient's insulin level could be measured with a tiny blood sample. They proved that type 2 diabetes was caused by the body's inefficient use of insulin, rather than lack of insulin. Better yet, this method could be used with virtually anything which produced an immune response and did not require the patient to be exposed to any radioactivity. Yalow and Berson had developed the radioimmunoassay by 1960. Their methodology can be applied to measure minute quantities of hundred of substance, like hormones, vitamins, viruses, drugs and enzymes, and diagnostic hormone-related conditions and diseases, revolutionizing diabetes treatment. Their published many papers and trained many young scientists in their tight-knit "Mom and Pop" lab, by then grown much larger than the old janitor's closet.

Recognizing both its huge commercial potential and potential for improving or saving lives, Yalow and Berson refused to patent the method. Yalow was appointed a research professor in the department of medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. Yalow won a Fullbright fellowship to go to Portugal, and the 1961 Ely Lilly Award of the American Diabetes Association.  In 1921, she won the Gairdner Foundation International Award for biomedical scientists advancing humanity and the American College of Physicians award. In 1972, she won the annual William S. Middleton Award for Excellence in Research, the highest honour of the Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development Service for outstanding biomedical science pertaining to the healthcare of veterans. She also won the Koch Award of the Endocrine Society. Tragically, also that year, Sol died at 54. Yalow named her lab for him and became the Solomon Berson Distinguished Professor at Large and became known at the "Mother of Endocrinology." Rosalyn knew that the Nobel Committee did not grant posthumous awards and would not generally award surviving researchers of joint research if one of the researchers had died. She knew she would have to prove herself on her own, and not simply as the "Mom" or their "Mom and Pop Lab." 

In 1975, Yalow and Berson (posthumously) were awarded the American Medical Association Scientific Achievement Award. In 1976 she became the first woman or nuclear physicist to receive the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. In 1977, Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her role in developing the radioimmunoassay technique (along with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally, for their work on hormone production in the brain). She won the 1977 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In 1978 she was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She won the A. Cressy Morrison Award of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1986 and the National Medal of Science in 1988. She continued conducting research at her VA lab until she retired in 1991. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993. She died in the Bronx in 2011 at 89.

 

References

Berson, Solomon A., Rosalyn S. Yalow, Arthur Bauman, Marcus A. Rothschild, and Katharina Newly, Insulin-I'13 Metabolism in Human Subjects: Demonstration of Insulin Binding Globulin in the Circulation of Insulin Treated Subjects, The Journal of Clinical Investigation, February 1, 1956. 

Harrod, Jordan. Meet Nobel Prize winner Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, who let doctors see into your blood. Massive Science. May 12, 2019.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Wikipedia, accessed February, 2026

Gellene, Denise. Rosalyn S. Yalow, Nobel Medical Physicist, Dies at 89. New York Times. June 1, 2011

Rosalyn Yalow. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2026. accessed February 2026.

Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson, Science History Institute Museum & Library, accessed February, 2026.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach 2026. accessed February 2026.

https://department.va.gov/history/featured-stories/dr-rosalyn-yalow/

https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/women-scientists/rosalyn-sussman-yalow.html