Rosalyn Yalow refused to patent radioimmunoassay

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

The story

In the 1950s Rosalyn Yalow, a nuclear physicist, and Solomon Berson, a physician, worked together at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital in New York. Studying how insulin binds to antibodies in the blood of diabetic patients, they realised they had found a way to measure hormones in quantities far too small for any earlier method to detect. Their technique, radioimmunoassay or RIA, uses a known amount of radioactively labelled substance that competes with the same substance in a patient's sample for a limited supply of antibody. Yalow dated its era to 1959.

Radioimmunoassay quickly became one of the most widely used techniques in medical laboratories. Yalow later wrote that it was used to measure hundreds of substances in thousands of laboratories in the United States and abroad, including in countries with far fewer scientific resources. Hospitals and laboratories used it to measure hormones, drugs and viruses, and to screen donated blood for hepatitis. It also remains among the least expensive ways to make such sensitive measurements. A patent could have made its inventors extremely wealthy.

Despite its huge commercial potential, Yalow and Berson chose not to patent the method, leaving laboratories everywhere free to use it. According to the Jewish Women's Archive, Yalow never regretted the decision. She acknowledged that she would have been a rich woman had she patented it, but said she had always felt uncomfortable having more money than she could spend usefully.

Her way of life matched her words. Even after the Nobel Prize in 1977, she lived modestly in Riverdale, in the Bronx, less than a mile from the hospital, and kept working in the same modest laboratory, which had been supported solely by the Veterans Administration. She deliberately kept her research group small enough that she could personally supervise everyone in it. Asked by a reporter about her life, she listed her marriage, her two children, a laboratory that was an absolute joy, her energy and her health.

The decision helped RIA spread rapidly into ordinary hospital and research laboratories around the world. It invigorated endocrinology, made major advances possible in diabetes, thyroid and fertility research, and helped give rise to neuroendocrinology. Years later one of her own trainees, John Eng, used the technique to discover the substance in Gila monster venom that led to the first GLP-1 diabetes drug.