Yalow, Rosalyn Sussman 1921-

NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING MEDICAL PHYSICIST

The Second Woman Winner in Medicine.

In 1977 Rosalyn S. Yalow became the second woman ever to win the Nobel Prize for medicine. She was honored for her development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), an application of nuclear physics in clinical medicine. Her technique made it possible for scientists to use radio-isotopic tracers to measure the concentration of hundreds of pharmacological and biological substances in the blood and other fluids of the human body. Dr. Yalow first invented the technique in 1959 to measure the amount of insulin in the blood of adult diabetics.

A Woman Pioneer.

After World War II the Veterans Administration (VA) began a research program to explore the use of radioactive substances in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases. One of the hospitals chosen for the nuclear-medicine project was the VA hospital in the Bronx, which hired Dr. Yalow as a...

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