Albert Lasker
Basic Medical Research Award
Rosalyn Yalow
For the discovery and development of the technique of radioimmunoassay.
For her role in discovering and developing the technique of radioimmunoassay for identifying and measuring, in blood and other body fluids, the concentration of hundreds of substances. These include, among others, hormones, drugs, vitamins, enzymes, and viruses.
Dr. Yalow is the first woman, and the first nuclear physicist, to win an Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Her radioimmunoassay work was done in collaboration with the late Solomon A. Berson, her associate from 1950 until his death in 1972.
Radioimmunoassay (RIA) is one of the most important clinically applied basic research advances of the past 20 years. The technique is an application of nuclear physics in medicine, because radioactive isotopes are used to measure the immunologic reactions.
By measuring precisely the differences between what is normal in biologic materials in health, and what is abnormal in them in disease, radioimmunoassay can determine what changes have taken place between the normal and disease states.
Radioimmunoassay was first applied in 1959 for measurement of the hormone insulin in blood, and soon revealed that the elevated blood sugar of adult diabetic patients is due to some factor interfering with the action of insulin, rather than to an absolute deficiency of insulin. Other RIA applications include determining whether the abnormally small size of some children is due to a deficiency of growth hormone; whether excessive production of steroids by the adrenal gland is due to tumor or to an overactive pituitary; and whether sterility is due to failure to produce, or secrete properly, sex-related hormones.
Radioimmunoassay is the method of choice for screening of blood used for transfusion to detect contamination with hepatitis virus; and for determining whether antibiotics or other drugs prescribed for treatment are at levels appropriate for therapeutic effectiveness.
For this revolutionary tool, now used in thousands of laboratories, which has brought about an explosion of new information leading to fresh insight and understanding in almost every aspect of clinical medicine, this 1976 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award is given.