"I was excited about achieving a career in physics. My family, being more practical, thought the most desirable position for me would be as an elementary school teacher." — Rosalyn Yalow

You gotta understand Rosalyn's parents. A woman physicist? Who ever heard of such a thing? Even if she somehow slipped through the cracks, what's the best she could hope for? A lab assistant or something. Compare that with a steady income of a school teacher...

Rosalyn didn't go into teaching, however. She became a secretary, but when World War II started, she saw a chance to get a scholarship that was previously available to only men. So Rosalyn dropped secretarial work and went to the University of Illinois, where she was the only woman in a physics department of 400.

After graduating and moving back to New York, Rosalyn worked with Solomon Berson, a fellow Jew, in developing radioimmunoassay, a technique used to measure substances in blood. For that, she got the Nobel in Medicine in 1977 (Berson was sadly shutout, as he had been dead for five years).

So the career choice worked out for Rosalyn. As for those parents? Well, they are Jewish parents. There's no pleasing them...