For my contribution to this year’s Ada Lovelace Day, I’m thinking about Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine for the development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a methodology for measuring miniscule elements in human bodies so they can be traced.
RIA has been used to screen blood for the hepatitis virus in blood banks, to determine effective dosage levels of drugs, to detect foreign substances in the blood, and other medical applications.
What’s interesting to me about Yalow, aside from that whole nanotechnology breakthrough, is that she got her shoe in the physics door during World War II, when graduate schools gave financial aid to, gasp, women rather than have to close down research facilities for lack of men away at the war. Had it not been for that little contretemps, Yalow might have continued on as a secretary to one professor or another.
I first came across her when she hosted a PBS series on the life of Marie Curie in 1978, the year after she received the Nobel Prize. Kudos to PBS for raising that awareness, because current media like the Discovery Channel or TLC wouldn’t touch it, Yalow not meeting their standards of on-camera talent (either babelicious or tattooed to the gills).
So we've made progress on some fronts, and steps back in others.
