Voices that Built Cytometry, Episode 1: Joe Gray

"Voices That Built Cytometry" is an oral history of flow cytometry: conversations with the field's innovators, the people who built the instruments, wrote the software, and figured out what all those dots actually meant. Hosted by Paul Wallace, Educator in Chief at ISAC.

Joe Gray came to flow cytometry as a nuclear physicist who thought the field he'd trained in was finished. Recruited to Lawrence Livermore in the early 1970s, when building your own cell sorter was the only way to have one, he was told by his boss to "do something about chromosomes." He borrowed a few from a colleague at Berkeley one afternoon, and ended up partitioning the human genome. 

 In this first episode of "Voices That Built Cytometry", Joe talks about the small club of people who started the field, fishing trips with Mack Fulwyler, the invention of FISH with Dan Pinkel, and the one thing he wishes he had done differently. 

SHOW NOTES: 

 After listening to this episode, Joe asked that we add two acknowledgments he felt he had missed. 

Scott Cram and the flow cytometry resource as a key driver in early days and Larry Deaven at Los Alamos and Marv Van Dilla at Livermore as leaders of the National Laboratory Gene Library Project. 

 L. Scott Cram led the NIH-funded National Flow Cytometry and Sorting Research Resource at Los Alamos, established in 1982, which developed instrumentation and methods and made them available to the wider research community. 

Larry Deaven at Los Alamos and Marvin Van Dilla at Livermore led the two halves of the National Laboratory Gene Library Project, which built and distributed chromosome-specific DNA libraries for all 24 human chromosome types. More than two thousand libraries went out to laboratories that could not have produced them themselves. 

 In 2017, Cram, Deaven and Robert Moyzis received the Los Alamos Medal for their body of work. Four Scientists Win the Los Alamos Medal

REFERENCES: 

Papers and meetings mentioned in this episode. 

The Alta summit. Gray refers to a meeting that "has been written up" is:

Cook-Deegan RM. The Alta summit, December 1984. Genomics 1989;5:661–3. doi:10.1016/0888-7543(89)90042-6 

See also The Alta Summit, December 1984 | Human Genome Project

Alta, Utah, 9 to 13 December 1984, cosponsored by the DOE Office of Health and Environmental Research and ICPEMC. It was not a meeting about sequencing. It was convened to ask whether DNA-based methods were sensitive enough to detect an increase in mutations among survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The answer was no, not at any then-feasible scale, and the consensus that followed was that answering the question at all would require the power to sequence the human genome. 

Note: Alta was organized by Ray White of the University of Utah at the behest of Mortimer Mendelsohn of Lawrence Livermore and David Smith of DOE. Mendelsohn is Gray's boss in this episode, the one who told him to "do something about chromosomes." 

Gray JW, Pinkel D. Molecular cytogenetics in human cancer diagnosis. Cancer 1992;69:1536–42. doi:10.1002/1097-0142(19920315)69:6+<1536::aid-cncr2820691306>3.0.co;2-j 

Fulwyler MJ. Electronic separation of biological cells by volume. Science 1965;150:910–1. doi:10.1126/science.150.3698.910 

Van Dilla MA, Deaven LL. Construction of gene libraries for each human chromosome. Cytometry 1990;11:208–18. doi:10.1002/cyto.990110124