Hormones, as author Randi Hutter Epstein relays in_Aroused: the History of Hormones and How They Control Just about Everything_ really do a lot — from metabolizing food, to regulating sleep and mood swings, to the act of sex, to prompting our immune systems. Hormones can make our lives both really amazing and really terrible. So it was a good thing when Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921-2011) developed a method for detecting hormones in the bloodstream. She, along with her research partners, developed a technique called “Radio-immunosassay,” which can detect and measure substances in the blood — the American Chemical Society notes that this method, which makes use of Nuclear Physics — can “detect a teaspoonful of sugar in a body of water 62 miles long.” Thus, Yalow played a major role in advancing the field of endrocrinology. She and two of her fellow scientists won a Nobel Prize for this in 1969. Even though Radio-immunosassay had enormous potential for financial success, Yalow and her partners refused to patent the technique.
Source(s): See the ACA article on Yalow. Photo: US Department of Veterans Affairs.
