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Rosalyn Sussman Yalow b. 1921

Medical physicist Rosalyn S. Yalow became the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing the prize in 1977 for her work in the development of radioimmunoassay, a technique used to measure minute amounts of substances in the body. A lifelong resident of New York, Yalow developed radioimmunoassay while working as a physicist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in the Bronx, and later used the technique to measure insulin in the blood of diabetics. In 1976, Yalow became the first woman to win the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and in 1988, she received the nation's highest science award, the National Medal of Science.