Paul C. Lauterbur, a University of Illinois professor of chemistry who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2003 for his pioneering work in the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), died on Tuesday March 27, 2007 at his home in Urbana, Illinois. The cause of death was kidney disease. Lauterbur was 77 years old.
He shared the Nobel Prize with Sir Peter Mansfield, a British physicist who is now an Emeritus Professor in the University of Nottingham.
Paul Lauterbur discovered that introduction of gradients in the magnetic field made it possible to create two-dimensional images of structures that could not be visualized by other techniques. In 1973, he described how addition of gradient magnets to the main magnet made it possible to visualize a cross section of tubes with ordinary water surrounded by heavy water. No other imaging method can differentiate between ordinary and heavy water.
Peter Mansfield utilized gradients in the magnetic field in order to more precisely show differences in the resonance. He showed how the detected signals rapidly and effectively could be analysed and transformed to an image. This was an essential step in order to obtain a practical method. Mansfield also showed how extremely rapid imaging could be achieved by very fast gradient variations (so called echo-planar scanning). This technique became useful in clinical practice a decade later.
Theirs was the fourth Nobel Prize to be awarded for discoveries related to Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.
In 1952 the Nobel Prize in Physics was jointly awarded to Felix Bloch and Edward M. Purcell “for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith.”
In 1991 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Richard R. Ernst “for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.”
In 2002, Kurt Wüthrich shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution.”
Lauterbur credits the idea of the MRI to a brainstorm one day at a suburban Pittsburgh diner….
While eating a hamburger at a neighborhood restaurant, University of Pittsburgh alumnus Paul Lauterbur scribbled some thoughts on a paper napkin. What he wrote changed health care forever. It also led, more than three decades later, to a telephone call from Stockholm.
Read the entire article: Magnetic Personality by Cindy Gill (Pitt Magazine Fall 2004).
The announcement of the Nobel award for Lauterbur & Mansfield “was controversial for some.”
On the occasion, FONAR Corp. in Melville, NY, which owns a key patent on MRI machines, released a statement claiming that its president and founder, Raymond V. Damadian, MD had been bypassed for the award “despite his widely acknowledged seminal discovery in 1970 that originated MRI”. Lauterbur and Damadian had shared an award several years earlier. In 1988, they were jointly offered the National Medal of Technology by President Ronald Reagan for “their independent contributions in conceiving and developing the application of magnetic resonance technology to medical uses, including whole-body scanning and diagnostic imaging”.
Dr. Damadian himself claims that that the Nobel decision was a wrong done not only to him but to his fellow medical doctors. “The MRI is emphatically an MD’s invention. Although the two PhDs who have been named for the prize - one a chemist and the other a physicist - made later contributions to MRI technology, as have many others since then, there is no way, outside of outright deception, to ascribe primary credit for the invention of the MRI to two scientists who merely imagined improved ways to display the image of the signals I discovered”, he wrote. “I believe it is outrageously unjust that the Nobel should decide to exclude from its award the MD genesis of MRI. And I am not the only missing MD in this blighted picture. We are all the missing MDs.”
Read more about the controversy here.
The citation at the website of the National Medal of Technology says…
In 1970, Damadian thought that NMR could be used to detect diseases in living cells. His experiments showed that cancerous tissue in rats responded differently to NMR than healthy tissue. Different types of healthy tissue could also be distinguished. Three years later, Lauterbur developed a method for displaying the NMR results as a computer-generated image.
Damadian designed the first whole-body NMR scanner and spent 5 years building it by hand in his own laboratory. He made the first whole-body scan in 1976.
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