Medicine: Yalow's Lament

Chimera of a cure

Coveted though they may be, Nobel prizes can be mixed blessings to scientists. At every turn, the winners are beseiged with demands to make speeches, grant interviews and perform myriad chores that leave precious little time for research. Even worse, an awed public often takes their statements with almost oracular seriousness. So says Rosalyn Yalow, the 1977 Nobelist in medicine, who concludes that the most prized policy for a laureate may sometimes be silence.

At a scientific meeting in Los Angeles last month, Yalow described some recent work with lab animals....

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