Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI

Foreword

Foreword Edwin D. Becker I first heard about the concept of NMR imaging from Paul Lauterbur one evening in December 1972 in midtown Manhattan. We were attending a biological MR meeting and, as a number of attendees returned to our hotel from a reception, I happened to be walking with Paul. “Ted,” he said, “you would be interested in this experiment I did with an A-60.” He explained that he had deliberately mis-set the homogeneity control to create a linear field gradient and found two separate NMR signals from two identical tubes of water in the probe. Of course—once he pointed it out!—that is just what one would expect. As he further made clear, he had done this in various directions and put the data together to create a two-dimensional image. So here was a lovely, simple way to look inside materials and animals. At that stage, it had to be a very small animal to fit inside an NMR probe, but, as Paul said, scale-up was mostly engineering. This was only the latest in Paul’s record of innovative accomplishments . Fifteen years earlier he had published the first systematic study of 13 C NMR, which in later years became extremely important in chemical NMR. He also was a pioneer in investigating several other nuclei, such as 29 Si, 27 Al, 119 Sn, 59 Co and 207 Pb. He had done many other clever NMR experiments. So, long before imaging, Paul was well known and widely respected in the worldwide chemical NMR community. In 1972– 1973, we all appreciated his new idea, but most of us certainly did not realize then just how much effort Paul had already devoted to working out in detail the potential for more efficient techniques and the immense range of possibilities for medical application. As time went on, I had the opportunity to deal peripherally with some aspects of MR imaging and viii Foreword to write at some length about the history of NMR, where Paul’s many contributions are amply recorded. Now, in this biography we have a marvelous account of Paul Lauterbur as a person and as a scientist. Joan Dawson’s well-written account gives us the “inside story,” as only she could write it. She describes Paul’s journey from childhood to Nobel Laureate in the personal terms of a loving wife. Her description of the science involved draws on her own scientific credentials but is written in clear language that nonscientists can readily understand. She does not hesitate to “name names” as she recounts the rocky path that Paul encountered during his efforts over many years to develop his ideas for further advances in imaging in an academic environment. She includes an enormous amount of documentation from Paul’s extensive files. The Nobel Prize for MR imaging was awarded in 2003—long after the method had generated a multibillion dollar industry and revolutionized diagnostic radiology. It was clear to just about everyone that Paul Lauterbur had initiated this whole field and deserved the Nobel Prize, but year after year passed with no prize for these great advancements in science. The question that held up a decision was: Who else—if anyone— might deservedly share the prize? Several early workers—particularly Waldo Hinshaw and Raymond Damadian—provided demonstrations of NMR images by building up the image one point at a time, but these proved to be too slow to be of practical importance. Several groups, notably at Aberdeen and Nottingham, showed important but rather primitive clinical applications. Richard Ernst advanced the initial Lauterbur technique by showing that the methods he and his coworkers developed for two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy could create twodimensional images very efficiently, but this aspect of his work was already recognized in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which had been awarded to Ernst in 1991. Peter Mansfield conceived an idea for imaging in solids about the same time as Lauterbur’s initial experiments in 1972, and later he developed widely used methods for slice selection and rapid echo-planar imaging in animals and humans. In the end, the Nobel Committee appropriately selected Lauterbur and Mansfield as co-recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Dawson gives a clear and objective summary of the developments in MR imaging around the world during the 1970s and early 1980s. She Foreword ix also describes the Nobel controversy but does not...