Biologist Gordon Sato stands before one of the many mangrove forests that his Manzanar Project has planted in the Red Sea waters off Eritrea (see map, below). In June, Sato was honored with the Blue Planet Prize for his two decades of pioneering work to alleviate hunger in the East African nation. The $500,000 international environmental award recognized him “for achievements that . . . are demonstrating to the world the importance of a way of living which regularly uses the technology of environmental conservation and humanity.”

Out of Manzanar

“I thought, ‘If they can build an atomic bomb and call it the Manhattan Project, maybe I can help stop famine and call it the Manzanar Project. Maybe it’s my romantic nature,” says Gordon Sato, PhD ’56, who has devoted much of the last 20 years of his life to alleviating hunger in the Horn of Africa nation of Eritrea. He was on his way there for the first time when he decided to name his antihunger project after the Manzanar relocation camp in the California desert, where he and his family, along with thousands of other Japanese Americans, had been interned during World War II. Arriving in Eritrea, he found the country locked in a brutal struggle for independence from Ethiopia, whose attempts to starve the rebel nation into submission had unleashed widespread famine in the region. The intense, soft-spoken American biologist won the trust of the rebel leadership, and with the support of the Eritrean military established an ocean-based fish-farming operation in a village on the country’s northern coast, which produced high-protein food for the wounded.

By the time Eritrea won its independence in 1991, Sato had committed himself and the Manzanar Project to creating new and permanent opportunities for sustainable development in the East African nation. When fish-farming proved to be too labor-intensive for the country’s fragile infrastructure to support on the scale he had envisioned, he turned to mangrove cultivation, which, as he explains in the following interview, has the potential to spur food production all the way up the Eritrean food chain and provide a thriving, low-tech means of enhancing economic well-being. To date, the Manzanar Project has planted some 800,000 mangrove trees along the Eritrean coast. Many more are on the way.

Gordon Sato was 14, living in Southern California, when the forced resettlement of the state’s Japanese Americans turned his life upside down and left him with an intense desire to see some good come out of his Manzanar experience. In 1950 an unlikely chain of events led him to Caltech, where he did his graduate work with Max Delbrück. In 1958, he joined Brandeis University as a professor of biochemistry, and in 1969 moved to UC San Diego, where he was a professor of biology until 1983. From 1983 to 1992, he was a director of the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984, Sato, now 78, spent much of his research career investigating how tissue culture cells could be transformed into cells representative of those in living organisms. This work has led to a new understanding of the complexity of hormonal requirements in the body’s cells and holds tremendous promise for the development of new cancer therapies.

In the mid-1970s he began a series of experiments in the California desert near the Salton Sea to develop a form of algae that could grow successfully in salt water.

“Many of the faculty members at UCSD thought I had gone bonkers,” recalls Sato, who nevertheless kept at his efforts, inspired by his memories of Manzanar where the “food was so awful we began looking for ways to grow our own in that harsh desert environment.” Blue-green bacteria are extremely high in protein, and Sato felt that they had exceptional promise as a food source in agriculturally barren regions of the world. In 1986, he brought his expertise and convictions with him to Eritrea. “From one who experienced the camp,” says the website for the Manzanar Project, “comes an effort to create a proud though bittersweet remembrance, to further memorialize the Japanese Americans and their hardships in a way that is appropriate to their character.”

Over the last 20 years Sato estimates that he has poured at least half a million dollars of his own money into the Manzanar Project, but his financial prospects have recently taken an upward turn. In 2002, he received a $100,000 Rolex Award, presented every two years by the Swiss watchmaker in recognition of innovative and pioneering projects intended to foster “a spirit of enterprise around the world.” And the recent FDA approval of the drug Erbitux for treatment of colon cancer could bring Sato additional revenues of up to several hundred thousand dollars a year, according to some estimates. The drug owes its genesis to work carried on in Sato’s UC San Diego lab in the 1970s; he and his son, J. Denry Sato, are two of the four inventors credited on the patent.

This past May, Sato returned to his alma mater to receive the Institute’s highest honor, the Distinguished Alumni Award. In late June came word that he had been awarded the $500,000 Blue Planet Prize for 2005 by the Tokyo-based Asahi Glass Foundation. Established in 1992, the international environmental award, which has been called the Nobel Prize of ecology, is presented every two years “to individuals and organizations that make outstanding achievements in scientific research and its application, and in so doing help to solve global environmental problems.” Sato was recognized “for developing a new mangrove planting technology in Eritrea. . . . His achievements, which have proved a practical measure to enable economic self-sustainability in the poorest area of the world . . . are demonstrating to the world the importance of a way of living which regularly uses the technology of environmental conservation and humanity.”

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In this interview, Sato discusses the Manzanar Project, his memories of the Manzanar internment camp, and his experiences at Caltech. He was interviewed on separate occasions for Caltech News by Heidi Aspaturian, editor of Caltech News, and Daryn Kobata, editor of the campus community biweekly Caltech 336.

What inspired you to begin the Manzanar Project? Had you known much about the area or the Eritrean struggle for independence before that?

I had met a scientist at a National Research Council meeting who had told me a lot about Eritrea, and I had talked to Eritreans in Washington, D.C., but essentially I just went. I didn’t really know much about the area or its language or culture. I just wanted to do something to help.

Now when you first started it, the hunger project was more of an aquaculture initiative?

Yes, with a focus on fish farming. We had to produce food quickly to ease the suffering from famine, and so we put the emphasis on that. We kept that project going for about two years, while the war was still being fought. After the Eritreans achieved independence, the situation became more complicated. Fish farming is sustainable in the long term, but it takes a lot of labor and money to get it organized and to keep it going. During the war, I had all the help of the army for this type of intensive labor effort, but after the war, they had other priorities.

So how did you then decide to transition to mangrove cultivation?

I was in an area with mangrove trees, and I noticed the camels eating them. I got the idea that the trees could also supply food for sheep and goats. There was lots of available space for growing mangroves, so it seemed like an obvious solution. Initially, I had to figure out how best to grow them and how to make the mangroves good food. We found that mangroves would be adequate food for livestock, as long as they were supplemented by a small amount of fish meal prepared from fish waste. It’s been a lot of work.

A growing program of sustainable development. To provide a stable food supply for Eritrean villages such as Hargigo (top left), the Manzanar Project trains villagers in the cultivation and use of mangroves, which the project has planted in abundance in areas such as the seawater off the port city of Massawa. The thriving plants rapidly mature into trees, whose foliage is then harvested to provide food for local livestock.

Had the Eritreans been using mangroves before that?

Not really. They had let the camels eat them, and that was about the extent of it. It had never occurred to them these trees might provide food for sheep and goats—that the seeds could be dried and fed to their livestock. They also didn’t realize that the seaweed that washes up on shore in great amounts could be dried and processed and used as animal food. This is something that had been done for centuries in Ireland, but it was a new concept in Eritrea, where sheep and goats have traditionally grazed freely on grass and other vegetation. They would eat the trees—the acacia thorn bush, for instance—but each year the supply dries up within a few months, which means that the farmers and herders have to repeatedly move farther into the mountains with their animals in hopes of finding more food. It’s a very unreliable form of subsistence.

So it sounds like growing mangroves is actually addressing several sustainable resource issues. It’s providing food and preventing deforestation at the same time.

Yes, And the mangrove forests that we’ve planted are quite beautiful. The thing about mangroves is that they can grow in seawater, and we’re planting thousands of them in the intertidal zones along the Eritrean coast. We wanted to optimize growing conditions, so we experimented to identify the mangroves’ pH tolerance range, and we also developed an ammonium phosphate and iron solution that provides the trees with essential minerals that they cannot get in sufficient amounts from the seawater. We grow the trees from small plants, and these new plants have thrived.

There has been some criticism to the effect that the amount of fertilizer used in mangrove cultivation might destroy local coral reefs. Can you comment on that?

I’m familiar with that viewpoint. My own view is that there are people who are pursuing their own selfish agendas and have no interest in getting a firsthand look at what we’re actually accomplishing. We have measured the fertilizer from our planting, and there is none polluting the sea. We have developed ways of releasing fertilizer so that it goes slowly to the trees in just the needed amounts. These people who claim that we cause damage are awful—and you can quote me on that. There’s one critic in particular who claims to be an expert on biodiversity, who could have come out and measured the amounts of fertilizer we’re generating. He hasn’t done that in two years. He could have come to see for himself if coral reefs are in fact, as he claims, dying, and he hasn’t done that either. If he had, he would have found out firsthand that there are no coral reefs right in the vicinity of where we are planting. I have to question the motives of these people. Their criticisms are completely unfounded.

Since the early ’90s, you’ve been spending at least six months out of every year in Eritrea. Where are you based?

Our center of operations is in Massawa, which is located on the Red Sea. I had a mild stroke recently, so the amount of time I can spend there is now somewhat restricted. However, my staff in Eritrea is super. I have four
Eritrean colleagues, who graduated from the nation’s Asmara University, whom I work with directly. We have about 50 other Eritreans, who make up our test group in the local village of Hargigo. We are having them bring in their livestock and we train them in how to feed the animals mangroves and seaweed. It takes time to get people accustomed to doing this, but I think we are about a year away from having enough food for all the livestock in the village. That should in turn mean more food for the villagers to eat, and should lead to greater self-sufficiency and economic independence over the longer term.

Do the villagers seem to be buying into this? Do they feel like they have a sense of ownership over the project?

Yes. We’re trying to get that in place. The important thing over the longer term is that the villagers are able to realize a profit from the work they do themselves.

Sato is joined by members of the local population who are working with him on the Manzanar project.

What would you say is a typical day for you when you’re in Eritrea?

I don’t know because I’m a pretty disorganized person. But I’m always working. One thing we need to do, and haven’t done yet, is put together a coordinated educational program. Most of our workers have never gone to school. I think that getting some of the scientific ideas across to people who have no education whatsoever is kind of difficult. But I believe we can do it. The main objective of the Manzanar Project is to train people to have the confidence to think independently, and try new things to build their country. It is important that they have a hands-on knowledge of the work.

It looks like you’ll soon be receiving royalties from the marketing of Erbitux and that you intend to apply nearly all of those to the Manzanar project.

That’s correct. I’d also like to add that the project has implications that go beyond what we’re hoping to achieve in Eritrea. We’re working very hard to perfect a low-tech sustainable-development program that can be readily exported to many regions of the world where hunger has been an enduring problem. In that sense, this work has the possibility of being really revolutionary.

In 1942, at age 14, Gordon Sato and his family were sent to the “Manzanar War Relocation Center” in California’s Owens Valley. This Library of Congress photo is one of many taken by famed photographer and human rights activist Ansel Adams to document the grave injustices meted out to the nation’s Japanese Americans after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

You named the Manzanar Project after the Manzanar camp, where you were interned during World War II. Can you elaborate on that?

It’s complicated, but it definitely left its mark on me. I was raised on Terminal Island, in east San Pedro. My father, who was born in Japan but had come here as a very young boy, worked as a fisherman there. Terminal Island had a large Issei and Nisei [first- and second-generation Japanese American] population, but it was also the center for the Pacific Fleet, and shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, all Japanese Americans were exiled from it. We went first to Los Angeles, and then a couple of months after that we were sent to Manzanar. I remember it vividly to this day. My whole family and many others were put on trains guarded by soldiers and sent to the resettlement camp, where we lived behind barbed wire.

Do you feel that that experience has influenced your life?

Probably. A very great influence on me there was a Professor Emerson from Caltech, who used to come visit a graduate student of his, Shimpei Nishimura, who was also interned at Manzanar. Shimpei was working on a project that involved making rubber from a desert plant, and I remember how inspiring it was for us to see an actual Nisei scientist. Professor Emerson would drive up in a 1928 Studebaker filled with presents. He was always extremely kind and helpful. Through Professor Emerson I learned about Caltech for the first time.

Years later, Emerson’s son was looking for a summer job. He asked me if I had space in my lab to take on a student. I said I’d take him no matter what if his name was Emerson, and he worked for a couple of summers in
my lab.

How did you end up coming to Caltech for grad school?

After the war ended and all the interned Japanese were freed, I worked as a gardener and then went into the Army. It was a horrible experience for me; I felt like I was just constantly battling racism there. Afterward I came back to Los Angeles and enrolled at USC as an undergraduate in biology but continued working almost full time, both as a gardener, and at my uncle’s fruit stand. It was a hard balancing act for me. I remember that I got the highest grade on my final exam in mathematics on differential equations, but only a B in the course because I never showed up for class. In the meantime—this was 1950—I used to drive by Caltech on my gardening route and think, “Gee I’d like to be a student here.” Then one day it was raining, and I fell off my gardening truck. It was kind of a dumb thing to do—I sprained my ankle. The next day, I limped into a Caltech office and told the first person I met there that I wanted to be a student. He turned out to be a physicist, and when he heard that I was interested in biology he sent me to George Beadle.

Beadle asked me what I was interested in, and I told him “transport across cell membranes.” He said, “That’s really biophysics—not my topic. We only take the best here. What kind of student are you?” I said I was a terrible student, so he said, “Go see Delbrück.”

So, I went and knocked on Max Delbrück’s office door. I found him sitting deep in thought, probably annoyed to be interrupted. He said, “What do you want?” I said, “I want to be a student,” and he said, “Tell me the story of your life.” So I did. For an hour. And he said, “Okay. Come back next week,
and we’ll give you an oral exam.”

I came back the next week to find that he had put together this committee: Beadle was on it, Dulbecco too, I think. All these future Nobel Prize winners. I remember a few of the questions they asked me. One had to do with the most abundant species on Earth. Another, on radioactive compounds, happened to be a differential equations problem. I must have been inspired that day—I was pulling answers out of thin air.

At the end of it all, they accepted me at Caltech as a special student—I wasn’t prepared enough to be a regular student, but I got regular Caltech graduate student status later on. Delbrück was my adviser: I wrote my thesis on an aspect of bacteriophage. In the beginning, it was very tough because I had never worked very hard at being a student before, and now here I was, confronted with the Institute’s math and physics curriculum. I had to study very hard. Working with Max profoundly changed the course of my life, for which I will be forever grateful.

Overall, I have very good memories of Caltech. I formed bonds there and found people who I felt thought like I did. I’d always been in an atmosphere where I was an oddball, and that wasn’t true at Caltech. I felt like I’d found a home. My family, however, was a bit baffled. I don’t think they had ever been quite sure what to make of me.

Eritrea Photos Courtesy of Manzanar Project.

Visit the Manzanar Project website here.