Yalow's Lament

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. Using the radioimmunoassay techniques for which she won her prize, she and a co-worker at The Bronx, N.Y., Veterans Administration Hospital found a possible link between obesity and the shortage of a brain chemical. Grossly fat mice seem to have smaller amounts of the hormone cholecystokinin than their skinner littermates. In other words, the hormone may be suppressing rodent appetites. Tentative though those findings were, Yalow discussed them with the press. She had been uncomfortable ever since.

The published accounts stressed that the work involved only lab animals and that if there were any implications at all for humans, it was not for ordinary fatties but for the grossly obese. Still, Yalow was inundated with a hundred letters asking for help that she clearly could not give. So Yalow has decided, for now, that mum's the word about obesity hormones. Says she: "The story's gone too far already and given a lot of desperate people a very false sense of hope."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.