Herzenberg wins Kyoto Prize

Immunologist Leonard A. Herzenberg, 74, of Stanford University, has been named as a winner of the annual Kyoto Prize for his role in the development of the fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS).The Inamori Foundation, which awards the prize, said that Herzenberg's first contribution came in 1969, when he gathered a team of engineers, physicists, and computer scientists to create the first FACS prototype. Using the plans for a modified particle separator that had been developed by Mack Fulwyler at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1965, Herzenberg's team at Stanford built two successful prototypes. The first, in 1969, employed a mercury arc lamp as light source, the Smithsonian Institution records in a 1991 history of the field. This was followed by a 1972 version that used an argon ion laser to detect cells tagged with fluorescent markers. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, Herzenberg and...