30-MAY-2011 :- Death Of Rosalyn Sussman Yalow , Nobel Prize winner.

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow 
(July 19, 1921 – May 30, 2011) was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally, for development of the radio immuno assay (RIA) technique. She was the second American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize Physiology or Medicine after Gerty Cori.

After graduating, Yalow joined the Bronx Veterans Administration Medical Center to help set up its radioisotope service. There she collaborated with Solomon Berson to develop radioimmunoassay (RIA). RIA is a radioisotope tracing technique that allows the measurement of tiny quantities of various biological substances in human blood as well as a multitude of other aqueous fluids. RIA testing relies on the creation of two reagents. One reagent is a molecule that is the product of covalently bonding aradioactive isotope atom with a molecule of the target. The second reagent is an antibody which specifically chemically reacts with the target substance. The measurement of target signal is done using both reagents. They are mixed with the fluid containing an unknown concentration of target to be measured. The radioactive atom supplies a signal that can be monitored. The target supplied from the unknown concentration solution displaces the radiolabelled target bond to the antibody. Originally used to study insulin levels in diabetes mellitus, the technique has since been applied to hundreds of other substances – including hormones, vitamins and enzymes – all too small to detect previously. Despite its huge commercial potential, Yalow and Berson refused to patent the method.

In 1968, Yalow was appointed Research Professor in the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, where she later became the Solomon Berson Distinguished Professor at Large.Yalow became a distinguished professor at large at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in 1979. Until the time of her death she continued to reside in the same house in Riverdale that she and her husband purchased after she began working at the Bronx Veterans Administration Medical Center in the 1940s. Her husband, Dr. Aaron Yalow, died in 1992. Rosalyn Yalow died on May 30, 2011, aged 89, in The Bronx from undisclosed causes.