GORDON SATO Obituary

SATO--Gordon H.,

of Wenham, MA, 89, noted mammalian cell biologist and member of the National Academy of Science, died peacefully on March 31, 2017 at home. Sato was the last graduate student to study bacteriophage biology with Max Delbruck, was a co-founder of the field of molecular biology and received a ph.D in Biophysics from Cal Tech in 1955. In his own academic research, Sato sought to adapt microbiology methods to the study of mammalian cells. His lab established the first mammalian cell lines to retain differentiated functions when cultured outside the body, and it used a novel approach to grow and study differentiated cells in culture. Sato and collaborators also created the monoclonal antibody that became the drug Erbitux (cetuximab) that treated cancers of the colon and the head and neck in a new way. Sato grew up on Terminal Island in Los Angeles Harbor and was interned as a teenager with his family in the Manzanar Relocation Center during World War II. The years spent in the desert of the Owen Valley inspired Sato to start the Manzanar Project in the 1980's to investigate ways of making deserts adjacent to oceans agriculturally productive. The goal was to use low tech methods to generate food for consumption or trade. The feasibility of the idea was demonstrated by planting hundreds of thousands of mangrove trees along the Red Sea in Eritrea that were used to feed livestock. For these efforts, Sato received the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2002 and the Blue Plate Prize from The Asahi Glass Foundation in 2005. Dr. Sato is survived by his wife, C. Josette Gaudreau of Wenham, MA, his six children and six grandchildren. Funeral services will be private. Assisting the family with the services is the Campbell Funeral Home, 525 Cabot Street, Beverly, MA. Online condolences at: www.campbellfuneral.com

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Published by New York Times on Apr. 9, 2017.

Memories and Condolences
for GORDON SATO

8 Entries

HL Leffert MD

August 7, 2025

GORDON WAS MY MENTOR AND FRIEND. I RESPECTED AND LOVED HIM. I WILL MISS HIM ALWAYS.

Jon Grossman

August 17, 2018

I remember growing up near the Satos, and visiting Gordon and his family (and horses) in Bedford, MA many times. Gordon was a colleague of my father -Larry Grossman. Larry idolized Gordon, calling him the modern day equivalent of Jesus Christ. Gordon and Larry also teamed up for a while in a Chinese food catering business. In the end, I think both men made the right decision to stick with science....

Albert Hugwil

May 9, 2018

My mentor, Gordon H Sato, taught me the complete freedom in Science. This discipline still lives in my mind. Albert Hugwil

Judy Hayami

June 5, 2017

The photo in the obituary is exactly how I will remember Dr. Sato, "Uncle Gogo" as I knew him from my childhood. He was a kind and humble man, a very good friend of my father and his family. I admit our families were not in constant contact, but he was always close in heart. The world has lost a gifted and giving human being.

I offer sincere condolences to his family.

Judy Hayami

Hyam Leffert

May 3, 2017

May 3, 2017

UCSD Biology sent around an obituary today, the first I heard of Gordon's death.

I met Gordon 52 years ago, in the Fall of 1965. I was a Biology graduate student at Brandeis; he was an Assistant Professor. I was fascinated by blood cells. Someone told me Gordon was culturing them in his lab. By chance, I bumped into Gordon in an elevator... where we talked about tissue culture (but he was not culturing blood cells).

He took me back to his office (in Nate Kaplan's Biochemistry Department) and we sat on the floor and talked about the internment camps in California during WWII, Dostoevsky and his studies at Caltech and the Phage Group -- all this, while he smoked a cigarette.

Although I did not work with him then, we became good friends. He brought me to his home many times, where I met his wonderful wife Miyo (and his older children, then, Denry, Sis, Nathan and Nancy [and later Sara and Amy]...and their horse!).

Gordon helped me get into medical school in 1967. In 1970 I spent my 4th and final clerkship year in Gordon's lab in the Biology Department in La Jolla, at UCSD. He told me to solve the problem of liver regeneration (using primary hepatocyte cultures)...but I needed a scintillation counter which was unavailable at the time. So I made cultures in his lab, and drove them at night to Robert Holley's lab at Salk (and used Holley's counter). Gordon never got angry; rather, he encouraged me to work on the problem at Salk (together, we eventually published a paper in 1972), where I stayed until 1980.

In the late '70s, Gordon came over to Salk one night, and made a concoction of buffered salts and nitrogenous compounds (in a 20 gallon Arrowhead water bottle) which he claimed would revolutionize farming in poor countries around the world. Perhaps he was already envisioning his work out at the Salton Sea which led to Manzanar in Eritrea.

I moved to the Department of Medicine at UCSD in 1980 (again, with Gordon's help); we remained close friends. In fact, much to Miyo's surprise!, Gordon sold some biotech shares he owned and lent me $10,000 interest-free to help me buy a home (in those days, bank interest rates ran 12-14%).

After Gordon left UCSD for Lake Placid, he would invariably return to La Jolla, and suddenly show up in my lab, unannounced. We would start talking as if time had not passed.

This is but a sketch of who Gordon was: A genuine kind-hearted man, an inspiring mentor, a true leader and lasting friend.

He enriched the world in many ways, science was but one of them. His memory will be timeless.

My condolences to all of his family.

Hyam Leffert
La Jolla CA

Jane Bottenstein PhD

April 16, 2017

Gordon was my mentor, a truly gifted and giving individual, and will be remembered always by those whose lives he touched.

Victor Stollar

April 10, 2017

Although I had not seen Gordon for some years, he was a special person in my life, one of a kind, someone whom I will never forget.
I first met Gordon when I was a neophyte post doc at Brandeis University, where he had just become an assistant professor. In addition to myself there were a few other MDs who knew little of laboratory research. To remedy our deficiencies he held "seminars" in his small cramped office with two or three of us sitting on top of each other and a small chalkboard. There with enthusiasm and humour, he would enlighten us about bacterial genetics, statistics, and some of the recent classical experiments in molecular biology where my knowledge was completely lacking.
Some years later, after Brandeis, I visited with him in San Diego, and in Lake Placid. He had not changed.
Gordon was completely non pretentious, and had a wonderful sense of humour.
Years later,we met again by accident at a meeting of the Tissue Culture Association in Orlando, about 1980. We had dinner together, and talked the whole evening over two very good bottles of wine. He told me that when he was born, it was touch and go for him, but that his parents or grandparents had put together a mini incubator using warm bricks to get him through his difficult first days. Perhaps because of that, he said, he felt he was put on this earth to do something important, and that he did. He was a wonderful mentor to a host of students and post docs, he opened new fields of investigation, and he spent the last years of his life engaged in showing poor people in Africa how they could improve their food production.
The last time I saw Gordon was about ten years ago, when he was awarded an honorary degree from Rutgers University, and asked me to be his "host" there. By this time he was showing his age, and had already suffered a stroke. Nevertheless he was still flying around the world doing good works.
It is not easy for me to describe what Gordon meant to me, and what I learned from him both in science and in human terms. For each of us, there are usually a small number of people who have an outsize influence on our lives, and for me, Gordon was one of those.
I will always miss Gordon, and my feelings go out to all his family. Finally, let me say that is a wonderful picture of Gordon posted here. It is just as I remember him and will continue to remember him.

April 8, 2017

I was in the NIH Laboratory of Gordon's friend J.Hin Tjio, and remember Gordon well. A marvelous scientist and person. I now live in Gloucester, and am saddened at his death. Dr Arthur Bloom

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