Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Biography

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was an American biochemist and a medical physicist who received Nobel Prize in 1977 for developing ‘radioimmunoassay’ or RIA technique. She was the only woman scientist until then to receive this prize in Physiology or Medicine. The technique was used to measure various minute quantities of biological substances in the human blood and other aqueous fluids with the help of radioactive isotopes. The technique involves the use of two reagents of which the radioactive reagent bonds with the target substance while the antibody reagent reacts chemically with the target substance. Initially this technique was used to measure the level of insulin in the blood but was later used to measure hundreds of other substances such as vitamins, hormones, enzymes and also drugs in the blood stream which could be detected easily earlier. Yalow was helped by another physicist, Solomon A. Berson, in developing the RIA technique. She shared the prize money with two other scientists, Andrew Schally and Roger Guilleman as Solomon Berson was no longer alive when the announcement was made. She was also the first woman to achieve many more scientific feats during her career such as finding the underlying mechanism which caused type-II diabetes. Her radioimmunoassay technique is also used for testing the presence of the hepatitis virus in patients.