Gerald Kessler

Montefiore Hospital, Bio-Rad (United States)

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About

Gerald Kessler made significant contributions to clinical biochemistry and laboratory automation during the 1960s, a transformative era in diagnostic medicine. His research focused on developing precise automated procedures for measuring clinically important serum enzymes, helping to modernize and standardize biochemical analysis in medical laboratories. Kessler's most influential work, "The Automated Determination of NAD-Coupled Enzymes" (1966, 28 citations), introduced a novel automated method for measuring serum lactate dehydrogenase using the Robot Chemist instrument. This procedure leveraged the colorimetric detection of a cuprous-neocuproine complex generated through enzymatic reduction, offering a precise and reliable approach to enzyme quantification. His earlier work on alkaline phosphatase determination (1965, 11 citations) similarly advanced automated clinical testing by employing p-nitrophenylphosphate as a self-indicating substrate, simplifying the analytical process while maintaining accuracy. Kessler's contributions were instrumental in transitioning clinical laboratories from labor-intensive manual assays to streamlined automated workflows, improving reproducibility and throughput in diagnostic settings. While his citation record reflects the specialized nature of early laboratory automation literature, his methodological innovations laid important groundwork for the automated clinical chemistry platforms that became standard in hospitals worldwide throughout subsequent decades.