Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was the first American born woman to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific discipline. Like nearly all women entering science at the time, she overcame huge obstacles to achieve what she accomplished. Since she was discriminated against in her efforts to attend graduate school, after all she was a woman and Jewish, she became a stenographer and landed a position as a typist in the biochemistry department at the Columbia University School of Medicine. However, her true love was physics. Due to the shortage of male professors during World War II, Miss Sussman was able to obtain a position as a teaching assistant in the department of physics at the University of Illinois, the only female teaching assistant or faculty member among 400 males.
She swung back to her alma mater, Hunter College, where she continued her teaching career. Fortunately, she became more and more research oriented and this evolved into a burgeoning relationship with the Bronx Veterans Administration hospital. She began to explore the medical uses of radioactive substances. She and her co-worker Solomon Berson developed the radioimmunoassay technique in which tiny traces of a chemical can be detected in blood. This was a huge leap forward in our understanding and treatment of a host of diseases. The whole field of Endocrinology, an much of clinical pathology, woes their scientific basis to the development of this technique.
Rosalyn Yalow, besides being a supremely gifted scientist, was a mentor and profound example to hundreds of women who entered medicine and research, no longer having to face the obstacles Rosalyn Yalow had to overcome.
