- Person
- Rosalyn Yalow
- Lived
- 1921–2011
- Field
- Medical Physics
- From
- American
The story
Some babies are born with an underactive thyroid gland, a condition called congenital hypothyroidism. It affects roughly one newborn in every two to three thousand. Without enough thyroid hormone, a child grows poorly and the brain cannot develop normally. Yet affected newborns often look healthy at first or have only mild signs that go unrecognised. Before newborn screening, fewer than half of severe cases were recognised in the first month of life, and children left untreated suffered lasting intellectual disability.
The answer depended on being able to measure hormones precisely in tiny samples of blood. That became possible through radioimmunoassay, the technique Rosalyn Yalow, a nuclear physicist, developed with the physician Solomon Berson at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital in the 1950s. Their method used radioactive tracers and antibodies to detect hormones in quantities far too small for earlier tests. Yalow and Berson's own early work had begun with the thyroid, using radioactive iodine to diagnose thyroid disease.
According to the Jewish Women's Archive, RIA was used to make early diagnoses in babies with underactive thyroid glands, so that they could be treated in time to prevent intellectual disabilities. Screening became routine: a few drops of blood from a newborn's heel are dried on a filter-paper card and tested for thyroid hormone or thyroid-stimulating hormone. Today most high-income countries screen every baby, and programmes aim to begin treatment within the first one or two weeks of life.
Treatment is remarkably simple: a daily dose of thyroid hormone, given as a crushed tablet. Most children who are diagnosed early and treated properly grow and develop normally in every respect. Congenital hypothyroidism is now described as the most common preventable cause of intellectual disability, and few treatments in medicine provide so large a benefit for so small an effort.
This was one of many ways the technique changed medicine. RIA invigorated endocrinology, made possible major advances in research on growth, thyroid function, diabetes and fertility, and helped create the field of neuroendocrinology, the study of the chemical messengers the brain uses to control the body's major hormone systems. Yalow received the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for its development.
Why it matters
Early detection of thyroid deficiency has allowed countless children to grow up healthy who might otherwise have suffered lifelong disability.
About Rosalyn Yalow
Co-developed radioimmunoassay; the second woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine (1977).
More about Rosalyn Yalow
- Rosalyn Yalow co-invented radioimmunoassayRosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson developed radioimmunoassay, a technique using radioactive tracers to measure tiny amounts of hormones and other substances in blood.
- Rosalyn Yalow was the only woman among 400 at IllinoisWhen Rosalyn Yalow began graduate study at the University of Illinois engineering college in the 1940s, she was the only woman among 400 members, and the first since 1917.
- Rosalyn Yalow refused to patent radioimmunoassayDespite its huge commercial potential, Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson refused to patent radioimmunoassay, so laboratories everywhere could use it freely.
- Yalow's technique made hepatitis blood screening possibleRadioimmunoassay, developed by Rosalyn Yalow and Solomon Berson, made it possible to screen donated blood for hepatitis, protecting transfusion patients.
- Rosalyn Yalow urged the world to use women's talentsAt the 1977 Nobel festivities, Rosalyn Yalow said the world cannot afford to lose the talents of half its people if it is to solve its many problems.
Sources
- Rosalyn Yalow Jewish Women's Archive
- Rosalyn Sussman Yalow Wikipedia
- Congenital hypothyroidism Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.