(New York, July 19, 1921 – May 30, 2011). American physics. She engaged in hormone research at the Bronx Veterans Hospital.
She was cataloged with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977, shared with the Pole Andrew Victor Schally and the French Roger Guillemin, for their progress in the field of radioimmunoassay peptide hormones. In 1976, she was the first woman to be awarded the Lasker Prize (for living people who have made contributions to medical science).
She was the daughter of Clara Sussman, born in Germany, and Simon Sussman, born in New York to a family from Eastern Europe. She studied physics at the University of Illinois. She considered herself a feminist. She said that “If we women want to be on the rise, we must show that we are competent, that we have courage and that we have the necessary determination to succeed.”. In his study he had a sign that said:
“Whatever a woman does, she must do twice as well as a man to be considered half as good.”
Her family wanted her to be a primary teacher, but she managed to enter the Physics Department at the University of Illinois in 1941 as an assistant professor of physics. She was the first woman to be accepted since 1917, and she was the only woman among four hundred men at a time when Jews were not allowed to live on the “university campus,” but that did not daunt her.
There she met her husband, the physicist Aaron Yalow, who introduced her to Judaism, since she had not been observant, but since then she has adopted the habits and atmosphere of orthodox Judaism at home. Her excellent grades in her theoretical subjects made the head of the Physics Department comment that this showed that “women are not good for the laboratory.” That subtle discrimination did not intimidate her either. She was very convinced of where she wanted to go.
Despite all her commitment and dedication, in her career she had time to be a wife and mother of two children: a boy in 1952, Benjamin, and then a girl in 1954, Eliana, both adult professionals. She lived with her husband until his death in 1992.
When together with Dr. Solomon A. Berson they began to explore the use of radioisotopes (radioactive isotopes, radioactive elements and chemicals) in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, their first investigations pointed to the application of radioisotopes in the determination of blood volume. , the clinical diagnosis of thyroid diseases and the kinetics of iodine metabolism. The time delay in the disappearance of insulin in the circulation of patients treated with insulin confirmed that these patients developed antibodies against insulins of animal origin.
By studying the reaction of insulin with antibodies, he realized that he had developed a tool with the potential to measure circulating insulin. It took several more years of work for its practical application for the measurement of plasmatic insulin in humans, but the era of radioimmunoassay had begun: it was the year 1959. The radioimmunoassay is used to measure hundreds of substances of biological interest in thousands of laboratories in the world. The application of nuclear physics to clinical medical practice made it possible for scientists to use the radioisotope tracer to measure the concentration of various biological and pharmacological substances in blood, other fluids of the human body and of animals or plants. The radioimmunoassay can also be used as a preventive method to rule out the existence of blood contaminated with the hepatitis virus.
Acknowledgments
In addition to being the first woman PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois College of Engineering in January 1945 and the first American woman and the first Jewish woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Science and to have received five honorary doctorates in Science (among them the one from the University of Hartford and the one from the University of Connecticut in the United States), obtained the following awards:
- Honorary Professor at Mount Sinai Hospital School of Medicine.
- Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Albert Lasker Medical Research Award.
- Award in Natural Sciences from the New York Academy of Sciences.
- Scientific Achievement Award from the American Medical Association.
- Koch Award from the Endocrine Society.
- Gairdner Foundation International Award.
- American College of Physicians Award for Distinguished Contributions to Science.
- American Diabetes Association Eli Lilly Award.
- VA William S. Middletonde Award for Medical Research.
Source: Wikipedia