Rosalyn Sussman Yalow is one of the extraordinary ladies – an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner. She was not afraid of such minor inconveniences as the lack of laboratory space to work with radioisotopes. She got it from the broom closet! Her work focused on iodine metabolism, the role of radioisotopes in determining blood volume, and research on insulin. Together with her colleague, Salomon Berson, she studied how long injected insulin (radiolabelled) stayed in the body. It is them that we owe to synthetic insulin, which our body does not attack. A very important discovery that they made at that time was the development of a method of measuring hormone levels in a test tube using antibodies. Thanks to this, you do not need to introduce radioisotopes into the body. The Yallow-Berson team created the RIA radioimmunoassay. Thanks to them, endocrinology has developed a lot and has become a separate specialization. In 1977, Rosalyn Yallow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for her work.

AUTHOR: mgr inż. Renata Kowalczyk

Photo. US Information Agency (see image credits at the end), Public domain, Wikimedia Commons