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Rosalyn Yalow: Speaking Out in Science
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10257 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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8 / 1986 |
3,056 Words |
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Denny Townsend
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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 for the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) virus.
Winning the Noble Prize motivated Yalow to reexamine her life, she says, and to set for herself three major goals.
First, she decided to keep her laboratory going. "My strength is back there where everything is reasonable," she says. "I have to be able to go back there to recoup."
Second, she reaffirmed her commitment to clinical investigation. "I want to find a few very good people who will carry on in the way I feel it ought to be done," she says. Many of those people have been from developing countries. Presently she trains scientists from Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, and
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