LONDON — The 2002 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology will be awarded to Leroy Hood, president and director of the Institute for Systems Biology, the Japanese Inamori Foundation has announced.

The award — which will be presented in Kyoto on 10 November — comprises a gold medal, a diploma, and 50 million yen (US$400,000). It is being presented to Hood in recognition of his, "outstanding contribution to life sciences through the development of automated instruments for the determination of protein and DNA sequences and their syntheses."

Hood and various colleagues developed, amongst other instruments, an automated peptide sequencer roughly 100 times more sensitive than previous instruments and automated peptide and DNA synthesizers. He also devised and developed an automated fluorescence DNA sequencer — a key technology that led to the development of the high-speed capillary DNA sequencers now in common use.

The development of many types of high-speed, automated...

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