Gordon H. Sato - Academic Career

Academic Career

Supported by the GI bill, Sato received a bachelors degree in biochemistry at the University of Southern California in 1951 and obtained a Ph.D. in biophysics at the California Institute of Technology in 1955. His mentor was Nobel Prize winner Max Delbrück. After post-doctoral training with Gunther Stent at the University of California-Berkeley and Theodore Puck in Genetics at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, he was a professor of Biochemistry at Brandeis University, Boston, MA from 1958-1969. He joined the Department of Biology at the University of California-San Diego where he was a professor from 1970 through 1983. Sato spent summer 1974 through spring 1975 on sabbatical working with Dr. Niels Kaj Jerne at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland.

Sato was recruited as director of the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center, Lake Placid, New York (1983 to 1992). His vision was to build a research university similar to Rockefeller University in the peaceful setting of the Adirondack Mountains of New York. Instead of the dependence on the labile support of individual government and private grants, the goal was to fund and endow the institute by proceeds from a for-profit biotechnology venture called Upstate Biotechnology, Inc.(UBI) which he established in the early 80’s. The idea was a radical concept for the period in which a non-profit research institute (W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center) would be supported and endowed from profits of a for-profit entity (UBI) solely owned by the non-profit entity. Start-up funds for UBI were solely from loans from tax-deductible gifts to the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in order to avoid conflict with private interests with the sole goal of funding the non-profit research goals.

Beyond his basic contributions in cell biology, Sato is known for his unique impact on many students and associates from around the world particularly from Japan and China, both in cell biology and the Manzanar Project. He was one of the first to personally recruit Chinese students and visiting scientists during visits to major Chinese universities at the beginning of the Deng Xiaoping Open Door Policy in the early 80’s. He first developed the idea of companies that directly market research reagents from individual researchers who know most about the product to the science community at large. This concept both helped fund the original investigators who were source of products, distributed essential research tools to the scientific community at large and generated cash flow to support basic research activities. Collaborative Research, Inc. was the first successful venture of this kind.

Sato is co-inventor with his son, Denry Sato, and John Mendelson, CEO of The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, of the original technology used in chemotherapeutic agents based on inhibiting the epidermal growth factor receptor as Cetuximab (Erbitux).

While director of the Lake Placid Center from 1983 to 1992, Sato established the Manzanar Project named after the camp where he and his family were interned in 1942. In 1992 soon after Upstate Biotechnology, Inc. became profitable, private interests acquired control of the company and the mission was diverted from support and endowment of the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center. Sato subsequently resigned as director and devoted himself full-time to the Manzanar Project.