Rosalyn Yalow

Her physics professors at Hunter College told her to apply anyway. Rosalyn Sussman was raised in a Jewish household in the Bronx by parents who had never finished high school, and by her senior year she wanted nuclear physics. She did not believe any respectable graduate school would admit a woman and pay her. So a professor found her a typing job — secretary to a biochemist at Columbia, a back door into graduate courses, on condition she learn stenography. She started business school in January 1941. In mid-February Illinois offered her a teaching assistantship and she tore up the stenography books. That September she sat in the College of Engineering faculty meeting as the only woman among 400, the first since 1917. The draft had made room.

Radioimmunoassay works like this. Tag a known quantity of a substance — insulin, say — with a radioactive isotope, mix it with antibodies that bind to it, then add a patient's blood. Whatever unlabeled insulin the blood carries competes for the antibodies and knocks some of the radioactive version loose. Count the leftover radioactivity and you have the concentration. The method reads hormones, drugs and viruses present at less than a billionth of a gram in a milliliter of blood, quantities nothing before it could see. Yalow and Solomon Berson published the insulin assay in 1960.

They never patented it. Yalow and Berson had a technique with obvious commercial value and they left it in the open deliberately, so that any laboratory anywhere could build the assay and use it. Berson died of a heart attack in Atlantic City on April 11, 1972, at 53, four years after leaving the lab to chair medicine at Mount Sinai. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously. When the 1977 prize came — the second in physiology or medicine to go to a woman, after Gerty Cori — Yalow took it alone, and said as often as anyone would listen that the work was his as much as hers. She had already had their shared laboratory renamed the Solomon A. Berson Research Laboratory, so his name would appear on her papers for as long as she kept publishing.

The assay is everywhere its inventors are not. Modern endocrinology rests on being able to measure a hormone in blood, and blood banks screen donations for hepatitis because Yalow and Berson made the measurement possible. Her own posture was harder to claim. She shunned feminist organizations, said the drop in women physicists after the war was a matter of interest rather than obstruction, and objected on the record to organizations for women in science: it bothered her, she said, that women thought they had to be treated differently from men. Girls took her as a model anyway. She died in the Bronx on May 30, 2011, at 89.

Rosalyn Yalow's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Insulin-131I metabolism in human subjects article
  Showed that insulin-treated patients make antibodies to animal insulin — the observation the assay grew out of 1956
• Radioimmunoassay discovery
  Built with Solomon Berson at the Bronx VA hospital and deliberately left unpatented 1959
• Quantitative aspects of the reaction between insulin and insulin-binding antibody article
  The physical chemistry underneath the method 1959
• Immunoassay of endogenous plasma insulin in man article
  Journal of Clinical Investigation — the paper the Nobel cited 1960

• January 1939 aged 17 Hangs from the rafters at Columbia to hear Enrico Fermi on nuclear fission She was a junior at Hunter. The lecture room was Pupin 301.
• September 1941 aged 20 Arrives at Illinois as the only woman among the 400 members of the engineering faculty The dean told her she was the first since 1917.
• January 1945 aged 23 Takes a doctorate in nuclear physics under Maurice Goldhaber
• December 1947 aged 26 Joins the Bronx VA hospital as a part-time consultant The radioisotope laboratory started as a janitor's closet.
• July 1950 aged 28 Solomon Berson joins the Radioisotope Service A 22-year partnership that ran until the day he died.
• 1960 aged ~39 Publishes the insulin radioimmunoassay and never files a patent The method spread free of charge into thousands of laboratories.
• April 11, 1972 aged 50 Berson dies of a heart attack in Atlantic City at 53 She had the shared laboratory renamed for him.
• 1977 aged ~56 Takes the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alone She had won the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 1976, the first woman to do so. Berson had been dead five years and the Nobel is not given posthumously.
• May 30, 2011 aged 89 Dies in the Bronx, a mile or so from the laboratory

• Enrico Fermi 1901–1954
  Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. heard lecture by
• Gerty Cori 1896–1957
  Biochemist and first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science, honored for discoveries about carbohydrate metabolism. followed as Nobel laureate
• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. shared a refusal to patent
• Maria Goeppert Mayer 1906–1972
  Physicist and Nobel laureate who developed the nuclear shell model, a fundamental account of atomic nuclei. fellow woman physicist
• Barbara McClintock 1902–1992
  Cytogeneticist who discovered transposable elements and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. later Nobel in medicine
• Sidney Farber 1903–1973
  The first remissions in childhood leukemia, and the Jimmy Fund contemporary