Page 7 - Flow Cytometry Protocols Fourth Edition

Howard M. Shapiro
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alternative methods, both elaborate and simple, in hopes of
improving readers' perspectives.
I remember strolling through Glasgow in 2015 with Bob and
Teresa Hawley and some other folks, during the CYTO meeting of
the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry
(ISAC), an organization with which I would guess most readers
of this piece are acquainted. The major lecture of an ISAC meeting
is the Robert Hooke lecture, given that year by Carl June, who has
been doing flow cytometry since 1986, and who has attracted
worldwide attention in recent years by engineering T cells to fight
cancer, a project in which flow cytometry has been and is expected
to be critical. It was impressive to hear him speak and even more
impressive to hear the discussion that followed, with several mem-
bers of the audience who had also ventured into cancer immuno-
therapy comparing notes on their respective successful treatment
methods.
The Hooke lecture was named because Robert Hooke had
given cells their name in a book written before he had actually
seen what we would today recognize as cells. Hooke's classic
"Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bod-
ies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries
thereupon," impressively illustrated by the author, was commis-
sioned by the Royal Society of London, for which he was a curator
of experiments, and appeared in January 1665. In it, Hooke, citing
their similarity to cells in a honeycomb, called the spaces visible in
thin longitudinal and transverse slices of cork "cells," with no
inkling that they had been formerly occupied by living components
of the tree.
Lenses (so named because they were lentil-shaped) had been
used to start fires since ancient times ( the "focus" is where the fire
starts) and correct vision since around 1300, but it was not until
about 1600 that Italian and Dutch spectacle makers combined
them to bring faraway objects closer, thereby inventing the tele-
scope, and to bring objects otherwise too small to see into view,
inventing the microscope. Hooke conceived these devices as
extending the sense of vision.
Although there is no evidence of his having provided a jacket
blurb, Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist, noted then that he had sat
up until 2 a.m. reading Micrographia, and described it as "the most
ingenious book that ever I read in my life." An even better indica-
tion of the book's popularity is given in the writings of Jonathan
Swift, born two years after Micrographia was published. In the
1726 novel Gulliver's Travels, Swift's surgeon protagonist, Gulli-
ver, describes an encounter with giant Brobdingnagian beggars:
There was a woman with a cancer in her breast, swelled to a monstrous size,
full of holes, in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered
my whole body. There was a fellow with a wen in his neck, larger than five
wool-packs... But the most hateful sight of all, was the lice crawling on their