(Book by Yalow, Rosalyn S.)
Book by Yalow, Rosalyn S.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0879331097/?tag=2022091-20
(Discusses radiation and its impact on society, and provid...)
Discusses radiation and its impact on society, and provides factual, scientifically based information on the interrelationship of society and radiation. Reviews the health effects of radiation through examinations of irradiated food, iodine-131 therapy, radon studies, and other related topics. Looks at the effects of exposure to large doses of radiation, including the cancer risks among atomic bomb survivors, the genetic effects of human exposure to ionizing radiation, and a health assessment of the Chernobyl accident. Includes an overview chapter by Rosalyn S. Yalow, recipient of the 1977 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work in developing radioimmunoassay techniques.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0841229325/?tag=2022091-20
educator medical physicist researcher scientist
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was born on July 19, 1921 in New York City, New York, United States. She was the second child and only daughter of Simon Sussman and Clara Zipper.
Her father, owner of a small business, had been born on the Lower East Side of New York City to Russian immigrant parents. At the age of four, Yalow’s mother had journeyed to the United States from Germany.
In her early childhood Yalow was already an avid reader. Having no books at home, she took weekly trips to the public library with her brother, Alexander.
Although neither parent had attended high school, they instilled a great enthusiasm for and respect of education in their daughter. In fact, Yalow's parents urged her to pursue a career as an elementary school teacher.
At Walton High School in the Bronx, her interest turned to science, especially chemistry. After graduation, Yalow attended Hunter College, a women's school in New York that eventually became part of the City University of New York.
One of her earlier college physics professors, who had left Hunter to join the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arranged for Yalow to work as secretary to Dr. Rudolf Schoenheimer, a biochemist at Columbia University in New York. According to the plan, this position would give Yalow an opportunity to take some graduate courses in physics, and eventually provide a way for her to enter a graduate a school and pursue a degree. Yalow received her master’s degree in 1942.
She was the second woman to obtain Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1945. She credited two physics professors, Dr. Herbert Otis and Dr. Duane Roller, for igniting her penchant for physics.
Yalow made plans to enter graduate school via other means. But Yalow never needed her plan. Gaining acceptance to the physics graduate program in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois was one of many hurdles that Yalow had to cross as a woman in the field of science. For example, when she entered the University in September 1941, she was the only woman in the College of Engineering's faculty, which included 400 professors and teaching assistants. Yalow realized that she had been given a space at the prestigious graduate school because of the shortage of male candidates, who were being drafted into the armed services in increasing numbers as America prepared to enter World War II.
Yalow's strong work orientation aided her greatly in her first year in graduate school. In addition to her regular courseload and teaching duties, she took some extra undergraduate courses to increase her knowledge.
Yalow’s first job after graduate school was as an assistant electrical engineer at Federal Telecommunications Laboratory, a private research lab. She found herself the sole woman there. The month after graduating from Hunter College in January 1941, she was offered a teaching assistantship in the physics department of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
In 1946 she began teaching physics at Hunter College. She remained a physics lecturer from 1946 to 1950, although by 1947 she began her long association with the Veterans Administration by becoming a consultant to Bronx VA Hospital. The VA wanted to establish some research programs to explore medical uses of radioactive substances. By 1950, Yalow had equipped a radioisotope laboratory at the Bronx VA Hospital and decided to leave teaching to devote her attention to full-time research.
That same year Yalow met Solomon A. Berson, a physician who had just finished his residency in internal medicine at the hospital. The two would work together until Berson’s death in 1972. According to Yalow, the collaboration was a complementary one. While her partner had accumulated clinical expertise, Yalow maintained strengths in physics, math, and chemistry. Working together, Yalow and Berson discovered new ways to use radioactive isotopes in the measurement of blood volume, the study of iodine metabolism, and the diagnosis of thyroid diseases. Within a few years, the pair began to investigate adult-onset diabetes using radioisotopes. This project eventually led them to develop the groundbreaking radioimmunoassay technique.
In the 1950s some scientists hypothesized that in adult-onset diabetes, insulin production remained normal, but a liver enzyme rapidly destroyed the peptide hormone, thereby preventing normal glucose metabolism. This contrasted with the situation in juvenile diabetes, where insulin production by the pancreas was too low to allow proper metabolism of glucose. Yalow and Berson wanted to test the hypothesis about adult-onset diabetes. They used insulin “labeled” with iodine-131. (That is, they attached, by a chemical reaction, the radioactive isotope of iodine to otherwise normal insulin molecules.) Yalow and Berson injected labeled insulin into diabetic and non-diabetic individuals and measured the rate at which the insulin disappeared.
To their surprise and in contradiction to the liver enzyme hypothesis, they found that the amount of radioactively labeled insulin in the blood of diabetics was higher than that found in the control subjects who had never received insulin injections before. As Yalow and Berson looked into this finding further, they deduced that diabetics were forming antibodies to the animal insulin used to control their disease. These antibodies were binding to radiolabeled insulin, preventing it from entering cells where it was used in sugar metabolism. Individuals who had never taken insulin before did not have these antibodies and so the radiolabeled insulin was consumed more quickly.
Yalow’s and Berson’s proposal that animal insulin could spur antibody formation was not readily accepted by immunologists in the mid-1950s. At the time, most immunologists did not believe that antibodies would form to molecules as small as the insulin peptide. Also, the amount of insulin antibodies was too low to be detected by conventional immunological techniques. So Yalow and Berson set out to verify these minute levels of insulin antibodies using radiolabeled insulin as their marker. Their original report about insulin antibodies, however, was rejected initially by two journals. Finally, a compromise version was published that omitted “insulin antibody” from the paper’s title and included some additional data indicating that an antibody was involved.
The need to detect insulin antibodies at low concentrations led to the development of the radioimmunoassay. The principle behind RIA is that a radiolabeled antigen, such as insulin, will compete with unlabeled antigen for the available binding sites on its specific antibody.
In Yalow’s Nobel lecture, recorded in Les Prix Nobel 1977, she listed more than one hundred biological substances—hormones, drugs, vitamins, enzymes, viruses, non-hormonal proteins, and more—that were being measured using RIA.
In 1968 she became a research professor at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and in 1970, she was made chief of the Nuclear Medicine Service at the VA Hospital.
In 1978, she hosted a five-part dramatic series on the life of French physical chemist Marie Curie, aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). In 1979 she became a distinguished professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, leaving to become the Solomon A. Berson Distinguished Professor at Large at Mt. Sinai in 1986. She also chaired the Department of Clinical Science at Montetiore Hospital and Medical Center in the early-to mid-1980s.
Yalow was a trailblazer for women scientist. In 1962 she was awarded the Gairdner Foundation International Award. The same year, Yalow was awarded the American College of Physicians Award. In 1972, Yalow was awarded the William S. Middleton Award for Excellence in Research. Also in 1972, she was given the Koch Award of the Endocrine Society, as well as the Dickson Prize. In 1975, Yalow and Berson were awarded the American Medical Association Scientific Achievement Award.
Yalow received a number of prestigious awards in recognition of her role in the development of RIA. In 1976, she was awarded the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Prize. She was the first woman to be honored this laurel—an award that often leads to a Nobel Prize. In Yalow’s case, this was true, for the very next year, she shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with Andrew V. Schally and Roger Guillemin for their work on radioimmunoassay. She was the second American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize Physiology or Medicine after Gerty Cori.
Yalow has received many other awards and lectureships, including the Georg Charles de Henesy Nuclear Medicine Pioneer Award in 1986. In 1988 Yalow won the National Medal of Science.
(Discusses radiation and its impact on society, and provid...)
(Book by Yalow, Rosalyn S.)
Quotations:
"A multidisciplinary approach is necessary to weave the tools and concepts of physics into medicine. Maximal effectiveness is achieved only when each member of an interdisciplinary team makes a commitment to at least on-the-job training in the discipline of the other(s)... I learned medicine and [Berson] showed a remarkable talent for physics and mathematics. We learned to talk the same hybrid language-a major factor in our success as a research team."
“We cannot expect that in the foreseeable future women will achieve status in academic medicine in proportion to their numbers. But if we are to start working towards that goal we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the guts and determination to succeed; and for those of us who have had the good fortune to move upward, we must feel a personal responsibility to serve as role models and advisors to ease the path for those who come afterwards.”
Yalow was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physics Society, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, American College of Radiology, the Biophysics Society, American Diabetes Association, the Society of Nuclear Medicine, the American Physiology Society, the Radiation Research Society, the French Academy of Medicine and Phi Betta Kappa.
By all accounts, Yalow was an industrious researcher, rarely taking time off. For example, some reports claim that she only took a few days off of work following the birth of her two children. In The Lady Laureates, Opfell reported that when the VA Hospital put on a party in honor of Yalow's selection for the Lasker Prize, Yalow herself “brought roast turkeys from home and stood in the middle of a meeting peeling potatoes and making potato salad while fellows reported to her”.
While in graduate school Yalow met Aaron Yalow, a fellow student and the man she would eventually marry. After graduation the Yalows moved to New York City, where they worked and eventually raised two children, Benjamin and Elanna.
