Rosalyn Yalow was the only woman among 400 at Illinois

Person: Rosalyn Yalow
Lived: 1921–2011
Field: Medical Physics
From: American

The story

Rosalyn Sussman grew up in the Bronx, the daughter of parents who had never finished high school. She read before kindergarten, was committed to mathematics by seventh grade, and was drawn to chemistry by a teacher at Walton High School. At Hunter College, the tuition-free women's college of New York City, where her mother hoped she would train to be a teacher, her professors steered her into physics. In January 1939, as a junior, she squeezed into a packed lecture room at Columbia University to hear Enrico Fermi speak on the newly discovered nuclear fission.

Her family thought elementary school teaching the most practical career for her, and it seemed unlikely that a good graduate school would accept and support a woman in physics. One admissions office told her that, as a Jew and a woman, she would never find a job in the field. So she took a part-time job as a secretary at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, on condition that she study stenography, hoping it would let her into graduate courses by the back door.

In February 1941, soon after she graduated from Hunter, came an offer of a teaching assistantship in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the most prestigious school she had applied to. She tore up her stenography books. The offer came partly because the draft of young men into the armed forces, even before the United States entered the war, had left places empty.

When she arrived in September 1941, she discovered at the first meeting of the Faculty of the College of Engineering that she was the only woman among its 400 members. The dean congratulated her and told her she was the first woman there since 1917. Her preparation in physics was thinner than that of the other students, so she sat in on extra undergraduate courses while taking graduate classes and teaching. On her first day she met a fellow graduate student, Aaron Yalow, the son of a rabbi; they married in 1943.

She earned her PhD in nuclear physics in January 1945 under Maurice Goldhaber, becoming skilled in measuring radioactive substances. That expertise led her to the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital and to the development of radioimmunoassay, which won her the 1977 Nobel Prize.