Union Scientific has been in the business of serving the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry for almost forty years. We design and build small and large devices, including one-of-a-kind items that our customers cannot obtain elsewhere. Shown are some interesting items which we now make as stock products due to repetitive requests from customers. We thought they might be of interest to yourself or someone in your organization. We will also modify a standard product to suit your particular application.
We pride ourselves in our solid engineering, and although the plate and tube shakers depicted in the bulletins may appear straightforward in their operation, they are based upon interesting scientific principles. We have written scientific papers explaining the physics behind these designs, and copies are available to you and your staff free for the asking.
Our History
During the 1970's, Mitchell Friedman and Louis Kamentsky left IBM Corporation to pursue the development of a fast way to count and characterize blood cells and other biological particulates. They named their new company "Biophysics Systems".
All of the cell counting equipment available at the time was prone to clogging and other limitations. Mitchell Friedman designed a flow cell using a sheath of saline solution inside a small glass tube to keep cells from sticking to the walls and permitting the measurement of optical properties of the cells using a focused laser beam. Light absorption, light scattering as well as fluorescence could now be used in characterization of these biological samples at rates approaching 20,000 measurements per second! Thus was born the first commercially successful Flow Cytometer (ref. U.S. Pat. #3,705, 771). Other patents soon followed as well as acoustically operated cell sorting devices. Acoustic sorting completely contained inside of a liquid filled housing permitted the sorting of pathogens, including cells containing the HIV virus, without generating dangerous aerosols.
These flow cytometers were sold primarily to researchers for several years, but it became apparent that Biophysics Systems was not big enough nor well known enough to sell clinical instruments based on this technology to hospitals for testing of patients.
A number of large pharmaceutical companies became interested in this new technology, and ultimately a contract was signed with Johnson & Johnson to market a new clinical instrument. After a successful period of working together with J&J, Biophysics Systems was acquired by J&J and moved from New York to Massachusetts*. All flow cytometers manufactured throughout the world today still use the sheath flow system designed by Mr. Friedman.
Soon after the Biophysics acquisition by J&J, Mitchell Friedman and Louis Kamentsky left the company to pursue other interests. Louis Kamentsky founded Compucyte Corporation and Mitchell Friedman founded Union Scientific, LLC.
*If you have further interest in how Flow Cytometry became commercially viable, and in fact, the "Gold Standard" for biological cell analysis, click here.
