Herzenberg Will Receive $446,000 Kyoto Prize

Stanford University immunologist and geneticist Leonard A. Herzenberg, 74, has won the annual Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for developing the Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorter (FACS). Kyoto Prize winners were announced June 9; an official ceremony will be held on Nov. 10 in Kyoto, Japan.

The Kyoto Prize is Japan's most prestigious private award, and it is presented by the Inamori Foundation. The prize includes a gold medal and a cash gift of approximately $446,000.

"I???m obviously delighted," Herzenberg says of the honor. "I think it???s a prize not just for me, but for all my collaborators over the years."

FACS allows researchers to sort and count live cells without destroying them. Fluorescent labels are attached to specific proteins on the cell surface, allowing these cells to be separated from other cells in a mixture. Red-tagged cells are shunted into one test tube, green-tagged cells into another. Modern FACS can sort millions of cells per minute.

Herzenberg and his colleagues initially developed FACS to isolate and then study the function of immune cells such as lymphocytes and T-cells. The prototype, affectionately called "The Whizzer," was described in Science in 1969.

FACS has since been used to study everything from HIV to leukemia, and it continues to be essential in many disciplines, including chemical biology, genomics, and proteomics.

The instrument has even been used to analyze plankton in the ocean and to perform experiments on the space shuttle, Herzenberg says. "When FACS was developed, I had a feeling it would have widespread applications, but not this widespread."

The first FACS was modeled after a particle separator from Los Alamos National Laboratory. By the early 1970s, commercial machines were available; now there are 30,000 FACS systems in laboratories around the world.

"FACS is an incredibly powerful technique," says Gavin MacBeath, an associate professor in Harvard???s chemistry department who studies chemical biology and proteomics. Herzenberg is "very, very worthy of this award."

Other recipients of this year's Kyoto Prize are Japanese mathematician Hirotugu Akaike, for his contribution to statistics, and Japanese designer Issey Miyake, for his artistic use of new weaving technology.