Once upon a time, a young geneticist found himself in the lab, straining his eyes to count immunofluorescent cells under a microscope. “I said, ’There’s got to be some kind of machine that can do this,’” emeritus professor Leonard Herzenberg recalls.
There wasn’t. So Herzenberg made one—and made history.
Modifying technology in use at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in collaboration with Stanford colleagues, in 1971 Herzenberg developed the first fluorescence-activated cell sorter, now used worldwide for research and to diagnose and treat diseases such as HIV and cancer. For this and other achievements, Herzenberg in June was awarded a 2006 Kyoto Prize, Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
The FACS sorts cells into tubes according to fluorescent tags that have been attached to them—a process known as flow cytometry. Herzenberg was the first to recognize the utility of monoclonal antibodies, which attach to specific proteins, in establishing these tags. In the 1970s, he and his longtime colleague and wife, genetics research professor Leonore Herzenberg, surprised researchers by making their specific monoclonal antibodies available to anyone who asked.
That approach is characteristic of the couple’s sense of social responsibility, say friends and colleagues. The Herzenbergs mounted the first effort to bring high school students from East Palo Alto to campus to learn about medicine and biology. In the 1980s, they concentrated their research on the new AIDS virus when few others were doing so.
“The Herzenbergs have a ferocity to see that things are done right both scientifically and socially,” says Garry Nolan, PhD ’89, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology who was once Leonard Herzenberg’s graduate student. “Len is one of the most amazingly ethical and concerned people that I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. He deserves to win the Kyoto Prize not just because of all he’s accomplished, but because of what others have been able to accomplish because of him.”
