Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1921. She went to Walton High School, and attended the all-female, tuition-free Hunter College. Yalow’s mother hoped she would learn to become a teacher, but Yalow decided to study physics. She explained, “I was excited about achieving a career in physics. My family, being more practical, thought the most desirable position for me would be as an elementary school teacher.”
Yalow knew how to type, and she landed a part-time position as a secretary to Dr. Rudolf Schoenheimer, a leading biochemist at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Because Yalow did not believe a respectable graduate school would admit and financially support a woman, she took another job as a secretary to Dr. Michael Heidelberger, another Columbia University biochemist. Dr. Heidelberger hired Yalow on the condition that she studied stenography. Yalow graduated from Hunter College in January 1941.
The following month, Yalow was offered a position as a teaching assistant in the physics department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gaining acceptance in the graduate program in the college of engineering was controlled by powerful male figures, who throttled opportunities for training, recognition, promotion, and many aspects of development in the fields of science, including physics.
In September 1941, when Yalow joined the faculty, she became the only woman on the faculty of 400 professors and teaching assistants, and the first woman since 1917 to attend or teach at the engineering college. She credited her position to the shortage of male candidates during World War II. Her male colleagues recognized her talent, encouraged her, and supported her. During her time at the University of Illinois, Yalow took extra undergraduate courses to increase her knowledge, because she wanted to pursue original experimental research in addition to her regular teaching duties.
In 1943, she married fellow student Aaron Yalow, and together they had two children, Benjamin and Elanna.
Yalow’s first job after teaching and taking classes at the University of Illinois was as an assistant electrical engineer at Federal Telecommunications Laboratory, where she again found herself to be the only female employee. In 1946, she returned to Hunter College to teach physics. Consequently, she influenced many women, including steering a young Mildred Dresselhaus (who would become the “Queen of Carbon Science” and notable physicist, materials scientist, and nanotechnologist) away from primary school teaching and into a research career. Yalow remained a physics lecturer until 1950, but in 1947, she began her long association with the Veterans Administration by becoming a consultant to the Bronx Veteran’s Administration Hospital.
The Veterans Administration wanted to establish research programs to explore medical uses of radioactive substances. By 1950, Yalow had equipped a radioisotope laboratory at the Bronx VA hospital and devoted herself to full-time research. She collaborated with Solomon Berson to develop radioimmunoassay, a radioisotope tracing technique that allowed the measurement of tiny quantities of biological substances in human blood as well as a multitude of other aqueous fluids. Originally used to study insulin levels in diabetes mellitus, the technique has since been applied to hundreds of other substances, including hormones, vitamins, and enzymes, which were present in quantities or concentrations previously too small to detect. Without accurate hormone measurement, diagnosing various hormone-related conditions and endocrine diseases like type 1 diabetes would be impossible. Radioimmunoassay would go on to become a standard diagnostic technique for newborn screening via heel-stick blood samples, designed to measure hormone levels and prevent severe developmental consequences, such as measuring TSH for congenital hypothyroidism. Despite the huge commercial potential for radioimmunoassay as a method, Yalow and Berson refused to obtain a patent on the method.
In 1968, Yalow was appointed as a research professor in the department of medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and later became the Solomon Berson Distinguished Professor at Large. She was a mentor to scientists from around the world, many of whom came to share her passion for investigative endocrinology research. One of her students, John Eng, later used her radioimmunoassay technique in 1992 to discover a novel substance in Gila monster venom that he called exendin-4. Exenatide, a drug based on a synthetic version of exendin-4, was approved by the FDA in 2005, and was the first GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs that have since become enormously popular for diabetes management and off-label weight loss use.
Another Mentee, Dr. Narayana Panicker Kochupillai, became a leading endocrinology researcher in India, studying thyroid hormones and iodine deficiency.
Yalow was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Portugal. In 1961, she won the Eli Lilly Award of the American Diabetes Association. A year later, she was awarded the Gardner Foundation International Award, and the American College of Physicians Award. In 1972, Yalow was awarded the William S. Middleton Award for Excellence in Research and the Koch Award of the Endocrine Society. In 1975, Yalow and Berson (who died in 1972) were awarded the American Medical Association Scientific Achievement Award. The following year, Yalow became the first female recipient and first nuclear physicist to win the Albert Lesker Award for Basic Medical Research.
In 1977, Yalow became the first Amercican-born woman to win the Nobel Prize in a scientific field for her role in devising the radioimmunoassay technique.
Yalow died in 2011, in the Bronx.