Rosalyn Sussman Yalow belongs to the record of physics as one of those whose work outlasted the questions that prompted it.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was born at New York City in 1921. Her recorded nationality is United States. She was educated at Hunter College and New York University.
Twentieth-century science was collaborative, expensive and political: the questions were pursued by teams, and the answers had consequences that reached well past the laboratory.
She held appointments at Hunter College and Yeshiva University, where the work centred on biophysics.
Physics rewards the awkward question, and punishes the elegant answer that no instrument can confirm.
Working from United States shaped what was possible. Access to instruments, collections, journals and colleagues has always been geographic, and the history of science is partly a history of that inequality.
The honours are a fair index of how the work was received - National Medal of Science (1988), Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1976) and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1977).
Read now, the significance is less in any single result than in the fact that the results held. Physics is cumulative, and a contribution counts if the next generation could stand on it.
Her recorded remarks are gathered further down this page.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow died in 2011 at the age of 90. The work outlived the debates that surrounded it, which is the only durable form of scientific success.
Achievements
- National Medal of Science — 1988
- Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research — 1976
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — 1977
- Held posts at Hunter College and Yeshiva University
- Educated at Hunter College, New York University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Fields of research: biophysics
