Mack Fulwyler in his own words

摘要

I met Mack Fulwyler only once, in 1999. We spent a week together in May at Hortobágy-EPONA, Hungary, during the Hungarian Society for Cytometry meeting run by Janos Szollosi. During that time, I had a wonderful opportunity to talk with Mack about the history of flow cytometry and why he had developed the things that he had invented. He told me many stories and I actually took notes! I also found out that the Smithsonian had made a historic video in 1991, in which Mack had been interviewed. I purchased copies of the eight videos made by Ramunas Kondratas and started to wade through them. I never made it to the end (14 h), but for some reason, just prior to Christmas in 2004, I came across the videos in my office and started watching them again. After wading through 10 h of tape, I came to the interview with Mack Fulwyler, which was conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Boris Rotman, at Brown University. What struck me was that Dr. Rotman had one of Mack's original instruments in his laboratory and it was right there in the video. At about 4 AM on the day before Christmas, I plugged “Boris Rotman” into Google and came up with a paper published in 2003, in which Dr. Rotman's email address was included. I emailed him immediately, and amazingly, he replied a couple of days later. It turned out that he was in the process of closing his laboratory and disposing of the instrumentation, which included an original Fulwyler sorter! He generously offered to donate it to us to preserve this valuable instrument. All interviews (mentioned later) were carried out on June 28, 1991, by Ramunas A. Kondratas, in the laboratory of Dr. Boris Rotman, Professor of Medical Science, Brown University (currently Emeritus Professor, Brown University). The text is taken directly from the video and reproduced later. In 1964, Marvin Van Dilla sent a letter to Boris Rotman because he was interested in work with fluorescent cells and he wanted to use living organisms in the instrument that he was building in Los Alamos (1). At that time, Dr. Rotman was working at the Syntex Institute for Molecular Biology at Stanford University, and had published a paper (2) on the use of 6-hydroxyfluoran-13-D-galactopyranoside (2), a deoxy derivative of fluorescein. At that time, Dr. Rotman was working in Dr. Lederberg's laboratory. This was the first paper to describe the use of flurogenic substrates to measure cellular properties. Marvin Van Dilla was particularly interested in this technique. Subsequent to the interactions between Dr. Rotman and Dr. Van Dilla, Dr. Rotman received the instrument shown in this paper [Fig 1], in 1967, when he paid $5,000 plus the electronics that were purchased independently. The instrument included the cell sorting modules (which were never used in Dr. Rotman's lab) and the fluorescence detection module, UV light source, and associated electronics. In early 2005, Dr. Rotman donated the entire original instrument to Purdue University, where it is being held with a view to development of a major historic display. The Fulwyler instrument as installed in Dr. Boris Rotman's Laboratory in Brown University, immediately prior to disassembly in March 2005. The instrument had not been altered or moved since installation in 1967, except for the addition of a laser instead of the UV lamp. In Mack Fulwyler's own words… “…It arose from less admirable motivation…. When I first went to Los Alamos to work under Marvin Van Dilla, our primary interest was in monitoring the fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, that fallout appearing in meat, milk, and other food products.” “With the arrival of the atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty, the appearance of radioactive fallout in the diet and in humans diminished, so we had much less to do in terms of monitoring fallout. So our group, which consisted of four individuals, three physicists, and a physical chemist, looked around to see what we could do to assist the biologists who were the other 60-some people