1982
Citation:
Rosalyn Yalow, winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology in 1977, became a physicist against the urging of her family, who thought she should be an elementary school teacher. She graduated from Hunter College in New York City in 1941, expecting to take graduate courses at Columbia University by doing part-time secretarial work for a biochemist there. The University of Illinois offered her an assistantship in physics, instead, and she went on to acquire her PhD in nuclear physics there. By 1947, she was to begin research in the medical applications of radioisotopes at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, where she soon began collaborating with Dr. Solomon A. Berson. Their research led to the development of the technique radioimmunoassay (RIA), which measures substances in the blood, such as insulin. The technique is now used in diagnostic laboratories around the world. Still conducting research, she is also chairman of the Department of Clinical Sciences, Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center, Bronx, N.Y.
Award was presented at the President's Cabinet Fifteenth Annual Awards Dinner, May 7, 1982.