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A tribute to Rosalyn S. Yalow
Jesse Roth
Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, North Shore–Long Island Jewish Health System, Manhasset, New York, USA; Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, New York, New York, USA. E-mail: jesserothmd@hotmail.com.
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Published July 1, 2011 - More info
J Clin Invest. 2011;121(8):2949–2951. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI59319.
© 2011 The American Society for Clinical Investigation
On May 30, 2011, after a decade and a half of physical and cognitive decline, Rosalyn S. Yalow died, just before her ninetieth birthday. Two days later on a green hillside in New Jersey, a short drive from the Bronx, a dozen intimates gathered to bid farewell. After a round of informal testimonials and traditional recitations, we took turns gently shoveling earth to cover the pine box that protected her remains. The rhythm of the shovels, the camaraderie of the mourners, and the glow of the sun brought forth kaleidoscopic flashbacks — Stockholm, Atlantic City, and the Bronx.
Rosalyn Yalow lived nearly all of her life in the Bronx, where she was born, educated and worked, raised her family and met Solomon Berson, her scientific partner for many years (1). Yalow and Berson were born in New York, children and grandchildren of immigrants from Europe (1–3). For both families finances were constrained due to shortage of capital, anti-Semitic impediments to employment, and the Great Depression. Both Berson and Yalow were educated in New York City public schools. Berson graduated from the legendary City College of New York, then all-male and tuition-free. After graduation, it took him three years (earning a master’s degree and working as an assistant in the New York University Anatomy Department) before he broke through the extreme barriers then in place for Jewish applicants to medical school. Berson bragged about his hundred or more medical school rejections. A classmate of Berson at New York University School of Medicine recalled that on Day One it was obvious to all that Berson would be the leading student in their class.
Yalow was a top student at Hunter College, the tuition-free, all-female counterpart of City College, where she majored in physics. Despite a brilliant record, she failed to gain admission to any graduate programs in physics, specifically and openly because she was female and Jewish. Finally, as a favor to one of her Hunter College professors, the University of Illinois accepted her into their PhD program in nuclear physics with the condition that they bear no responsibility for placing her in a job after graduation. Indeed, despite a brilliant school record and the World War II shortage of civilian males, employment for her was spotty. It was two years before she joined the Veterans Administration Hospital (“Bronx VA”) as a consultant and five years until she was hired as a full-time physicist (1, 2).
Through talent, hard work, and good luck, in 1950 Ros became the fledgling head of the nascent radioisotope unit at the Bronx VA. Novel applications of radioisotopes to medicine were burgeoning. She developed a solid program of service, teaching, and research but recognized that to reach its full potential the unit needed a physician. After the rejection of many candidates, Bernard Straus, the highly regarded chief of the medical service, introduced Ros to the smartest MD he had ever trained. After an hour, Ros was certain that Sol Berson was the smartest MD she had ever met (1).
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Berson’s death and aftermath
In April 1972, suddenly and unexpectedly, Sol Berson died of a massive heart attack while attending a FASEB meeting in Atlantic City, just a few days before his 54th birthday (1–3). Grief was everywhere — for the Berson family, for the Yalow family, and for Berson’s many colleagues and admirers. Soon, we realized that a collateral loss might be the endocrine community’s Nobel expectations for Berson and Yalow.
Yalow was grief stricken at the loss of her research partner and possibly of her Nobel dreams (1). Good fortune placed Eugene Straus, son of Bernard Straus, in Yalow’s lab as a fellow. In addition to providing vital psychological support, he energized the lab’s research (1). Over the next several years (1973–1977), the pair produced a substantial corpus of new studies of hormones from the gastrointestinal tract and the brain (1). This remarkable burst of new work won over any doubters — it was then widely recognized that Yalow herself was a fully worthy laureate.
My most vivid image is Ros Yalow (Figure 1), clad in a brilliant blue evening dress, stepping forward to accept her Nobel Prize from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf (1, 2). That evening in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy, representing all of the Nobel laureates, Ros responded eloquently to the traditional challenge to the awardees from the university students of Sweden (2). A couple of days earlier in her Nobel Lecture at the Karolinska Institute, she recounted the scientific work that led to this special moment, including the vital role played by her scientific partner, the late Solomon Berson (1–3). Once again she showed a slide that included the famous 1956 letter from JCI’s editor-in-chief Stan Bradley rejecting Yalow and Berson’s earliest paper on antibodies to insulin (4, 7). At each event I was there applauding along with her family (husband Aaron and children Ben and Elanna) and colleagues Eugene Straus, Roger Unger, Harold Rifkin, and Susan Roth (1).
Figure 1Rosalyn S. Yalow accepting the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine presented by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden on December 10, 1977. Photo courtesy of Ben Yalow.
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