I Don’t Know Why You Say Yalow, I Say Goodbye

Rosalyn Yalow, who proved that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, as long as your kitchen has a radioimmunology lab, has died at the age of 89. In an era when June Cleaver was the epitome of feminine ambition, Yalow was earning the second Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to a woman as the co-discoverer of the radioimmunoassay, an extremely sensitive means to measure insulin and other hormones in the blood. The assay, which contradicted all previous thinking about the sensitivity of the immune system, enabled her to show that inability to use insulin caused diabetes and facilitated breakthroughs in early diagnosis of disorders related to thyroid dysfunction. All this despite the fact that she was, in the words of Purdue University that denied her application for graduate school: “She is from New York. She is Jewish. She is a woman.” The College of Physicians and Surgeons, now part of Columbia University, offered her a job as a secretary and promised that if she was a good girl, she could take a couple classes. She opted for a teaching assistantship at the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, instead, although an A-minus in one laboratory course confirmed for the chairman of the physics department that women could not excel at lab work.