RE: Socially Responsible Cytometry in the Age of AIDS

Dear Dr.Shapiro,
I have admired you ever since my foray in to Cytometry and that
admiration only grows more after reading your note. I pray for your
speedy recovery and I am sure that you will be back to business soon. 
All the best,
Vijay 

************************************************
Vijay Nandakumar
Development
Cellular and Molecular Immunology Lab.
Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN
nandakumar.vijay@mayo.edu
*************************************************
At the end of the day, just be Happy !!! :) 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-cyto-sendout@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu
[mailto:owner-cyto-sendout@flowcyt.cyto.purdue.edu] On Behalf Of Howard
Shapiro
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 8:27 PM
To: cyto-inbox
Subject: Socially Responsible Cytometry in the Age of AIDS

In October, 2000, after being asked whether I could make a few	
inexpensive red diode laser source flow cytometers for CD4+ T cell  
counting in connection with HIV vaccine trials in Africa, I sent an e- 
mail to a large number of people in the cytometry community  
suggesting we turn our collective attention to the problem of  
providing practical and affordable solutions to this and other	
infectious disease-related diagnostic problems in resource-poor  
countries. At that time, I decided to make this the focal point of my  
research for as long as I continued to work in the field of cytometry.

Between early 2001 and mid-2003, much of my time was devoted to  
producing the 4th Edition of Practical Flow Cytometry. Since then, I  
have concentrated on developing a new generation of instruments, all  
of which are low-magnification image cytometers, using high-intensity  
LEDs for fluorescence excitation and CCD or CMOS camera chips for  
detection. These systems are small, rugged, simple, energy-efficient,  
and very cheap, and ought to be usable not only for CD4 counting,  
yielding results equivalent to those now obtained by flow cytometry,  
but also for diagnosis and drug susceptibility testing in malaria and  
TB, epidemics of which coexist with the HIV epidemic in many  
countries. Some preliminary work has been summarized in two papers  
(Shapiro HM: "Cellular astronomy" - a foreseeable future in  
cytometry. Cytometry. 2004; 60A:115-124, and Shapiro HM, Perlmutter  
NG: Personal cytometers: slow flow or no flow?	Cytometry. 2006; 69A: 
620-630), and both my colleagues and I and other groups are working  
toward commercially feasible implementations. The apparatus should  
have a wide range of applications in affluent as well as in resource- 
poor countries, and I suspect that imaging techniques, including some  
relatively simple and inexpensive approaches, will become  
increasingly important in cytometry in general over the next few years.

I now have strong motivation to hope that this happens sooner rather  
than later. Over the past two months, a series of tests have revealed  
that I have an abdominal lymphoma, which may or may not be descended  
from the gastric MALT lymphoma for which I was treated in 1991; I  
will be starting chemotherapy tomorrow. Luckily, my medical condition  
was not generally known last month, and therefore cast no shadow on  
the wonderful surprise party that colleagues from near and far	
convened then to celebrate my 65th birthday.

My plan is to keep working as long as I can, both on the new  
instruments and on a new book, to be called "Cytometry from Scratch,"  
which should be small and unintimidating enough for newbies but also  
contain enough new information - reflecting the changes in my  
analytical philosophy over the past few years - to be of use to  
people who already have Practical Flow Cytometry. None of my books  
would have been possible without support from the cytometry  
community, and I hope I can continue to draw on your collective  
expertise.

I know that some of you heeded my original call to action six years  
ago, and that others have more recently joined in the effort,  
including some motivated by Stephen Lewis's lecture at the ISAC  
meeting this past May. I hope this message will attract even more  
recruits. As "Cytometry from Scratch" will point out, the history of  
our field is intertwined with the stories of malaria and TB, as well  
as with the more recent saga of HIV-AIDS, and there is a great deal  
we can and should do to improve the diagnosis and treatment of	these  
killers of millions. It's probably considerably easier than curing  
cancer.

I'm not sure this qualifies as a new law of cytometry, but it's  
better to be the phenotyper than the phenotypee.

All the best,

-Howard