Rosalyn Yalow: Nobel Laureate: Her Life and Work in Medicine (Helix Books)

This biography of Rosalyn Yalow chronicles more than the life and scientific achievements of a dedicated research scientist. The tenacity Yalow applied to achieving her life's goals--a good family and a Nobel Prize-winning scientific career (medicine-physiology, 1977)--reveals what is both wonderful and wrong with United States research science and medicine. Issues like gender bias, informed consent for patients in clinical trials, fear of radioactivity, and the role of research, education, and patient care in hospitals, where the bottom line looms large, are all discussed in the context of this remarkable woman's life.

As a Jewish woman, Rosalyn Sussman was unique among her classmates when she began graduate school in physics at the University of Illinois in 1941. Three and a half years later, more quickly than anyone else in her program, she completed her Ph.D. By then, she had married a classmate, Aaron Yalow, who would be her husband for the next 50 years. Through memoir and interviews with Yalow's professional and biological families, it is clear that nothing was going to stop her from achieving her goals, and that this aggressive drive affected those close to her.

Without ever submitting a research grant proposal, Yalow and Solomon Berson, her second husband and research partner, were able to develop the radioimmunoassay (RIA), still a key component in biochemical research. Yalow and Berson freely trained scientists from all over the world in RIA and kept no secrets from the scientific community. Such openness stands in stark contrast to today's secretive, competitive, grant-driven culture of academic research. Strauss's biography pays tribute to a remarkable scientist and offers a unique snapshot of science in the latter half of the 20th century. --Irwin Scot Hirsh