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Rosalyn Yalow: Speaking Out in Science
| Article
# : |
10257 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
3,056 Words |
| Author
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Denny Townsend
Denny Townsend is a writer and editor at The Washington
Times,
Washington, D.C. |
After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April, reporters from around the world were scrambling for quotes from experts who could supplement the sketchy information offered by the Soviets. Speculation ran wild amid the vacuum of facts, with the Western press reporting mostly worst-case scenarios for the Soviet's closest neighbors.
Nobel laureate Rosalyn S. Yalow, who won the prize in 1977 for her work in nuclear medicine, was contacted by a Yugoslavian television station. What she said was decidedly different from what many others were saying.
"I told them that I doubted very much that the amount of radiation exposure outside of the Soviet Union would result in any negative health effects," she says in a matter-of-fact tone.
This remark was just the kind of bluntly stated opinion for which Yalow has been both lauded and disdained since becoming a Nobel Laureate. She simply refuses to mince words. Her detractors have called her a "monster," and "reckless." Her friends and many other observers call her "brilliant," a "powerhouse," and "earth mother."
Whatever else she may be, she has become a formidable pro-nuclear spokesman in a nuclear-phobic society. Few can argue with her credentials. These encompass over thirty years of intimate acquaintance with radiation, not as destroyer but as healer, and her storehouse of scientific knowledge.
Nuclear Medicine
Until a few years ago she had been content to carry on with her work in nuclear medicine in a relatively quiet fashion at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, where she is the senior medical investigator. It was there that she and her collaborator and friend of twenty-two years, the late Dr. Solomon A. Berson, developed the technique of radioimmunoassay (RIA), one of the most important medical innovations in this century. For this discovery she won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.
RIA is a technique for measuring pharmacological and biologic substances in body fluids with radioisotopic tracers. Since Berson and Yalow first used RIA to measure insulin levels of diabetics, it has been adapted to hundreds of other applications, including the detection of the hepatitis virus, mass screening for hypothyroidism, and the detection and treatment of tumors. It may soon be used to assay
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