Page 6 - Flow Cytometry Protocols Fourth Edition

Chapter 1

Flow Cytometry: The Glass Is Half Full

Howard M. Shapiro

Abstract

Accompanied by a historical perspective of the field of cytometry, this introductory chapter provides a broad
view of what flow cytometry can do; hence, the glass is half full.
Key words Micrographia, Cells, Blood cells, Dyes, Fluorescence, Microscopy, Hemacytometry, Flow
cytometry, Electrostatic sorting, Coulter volume, Poisson statistics

1 Introduction

This book presents ample evidence that flow cytometry has
provided the means for developing an armamentarium of reagents
and measurements that make it possible to answer questions about
cells that nobody even knew how to ask when the field got started.
The technology now accounts for a multi billion-dollar market, with
tens of thousands of instruments, most of which cost at least tens of
thousands of U.S. dollars, now in use worldwide. Most of the
annual expenditure is aimed, directly or indirectly, at improving
the overall health of our species, which may require suppressing
or eliminating cells from other species and rogue elements from our
own. A recent PubMed search on "flow cytometry returned
180,038 references, dating back to the 1960s; over 75,000 have
been added since I wrote a chapter for the previous edition of this
compendium in 2010.
There are almost certainly not tens of thousands of people who
know how to make optimal use of the full range of capabilities of
any state-of-the-art flow cytometer; books such as this one are
designed to help the users keep up with the apparatus and the
methodology, both of which make demands on the user. This
chapter and those that follow, except for the last one, will provide
a broad view of what flow can do. At the end of the book, I will
focus on what flow cannot do, and on what can now be done using

Teresa S. Hawley and Robert G. Hawley (eds.), Flow Cytometry Protocols, Methods in Molecular Biology,
vol. 1678, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-7346-0_ 1, © Springer Science+Business Media LLC 2018
1