Gordon Sato

Hebo OR 97122

Best known for his contribution to the understanding of the multiple factors required for the culture and husbandry of mammalian cells outside the body, Gordon Sato exemplifies the nontraditional student. In 1950, he was working as a gardener near the Caltech campus. Having spent his high-school years in the Manzanar internment camp and being, by his own admission, a terrible undergraduate student, he nevertheless decided to try making his dream of attending Caltech come true. He walked onto campus and ended up being interviewed by Nobel Laureate Max Delbrück, who recognized his potential and took him on as a graduate student. After completing his PhD, Sato held postdoctoral positions at UC Berkeley and the University of Colorado Medical School, then joined the Brandeis University faculty; he was a professor of biochemistry there from 1958 to 1969. He then moved to the biology department of UC San Diego, where he was a faculty member until 1983. From 1983 to 1992, he was a director of the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. Sato has founded several biotechnology ventures, and in the early 1980s codeveloped the cancer drug Erbitux. In recent years, he has devoted himself entirely to the Manzanar Project, which he started in the late 1980s to help alleviate famine in Ethiopia. To date, the project has planted some 600,000 mangrove trees—whose seeds provide feed for livestock—along the Eritrean coast.