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1. Epiphany in a Hamburger
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1 Epiphany in a Hamburger Before every big breakthrough, it is first a crazy idea. —Paul Lauterbur On September 2, 1971, Paul Lauterbur was at the site of NMR Specialties , a company he had helped to found, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania , when a potential customer showed up. In his attempt to save the floundering company, Paul had been flying to New Kensington at the beginning of each week and back to his family and students at Stony Brook for the weekend. To feed his kids, save his research program, and save the small company from instant bankruptcy, he had spent the summer trying to learn, under extreme pressure, how to manage a company that would soon disappear forever. As a sales strategy, NMR Specialties made its equipment available to potential customers. It was for this reason that on that September day, Leon Saryan, then a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, came to the New Kensington laboratories in an effort to confirm the research findings of Raymond Damadian, of the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. Damadian had published a paper in Science earlier that year titled “Tumor Detection by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance,”1 in which he announced that the time to decay (T2 relaxation time) and the time to recovery of magnetization (T1) for NMR signals, those “I am here” signals from atomic nuclei, could be used to detect and diagnose cancer. As Paul observed Saryan’s measurements, he saw that the signals differed markedly between normal and malignant tissues. But Saryan was cutting the tissue samples out of rats, and Paul thought such measurements could never be very useful in research or medicine. “It didn’t seem 2 Chapter 1 right to kill the patient to diagnose the illness,” he said. “It was a bloody messy affair, not the sort of thing chemists are used to seeing.” He never liked the sight of blood. “Thinking of a way to do it without surgery took on a greater importance for me than it might for a doctor,” he admitted. “As a naive chemist, I couldn’t imagine cutting people up to see if they were sick or not.” He felt there had to be a better way. If you could find a way to localize the NMR signals to specific places in a patient without using harmful invasive procedures, well, that would be a different matter altogether. If physicians could do that, they could look into any part of the body remotely to see what the problem was, and the patient would be unaffected by the analysis. “I believed that NMR relaxation time measurements on tissue specimens were unlikely to contribute much to the rich variety of information available from optical microscopy. All of this information about the tissues was apparently there, however, within the living organism. Was there any way that one could tell exactly which location an NMR signal was coming from within a complex object? ”2 That same evening he figured it out. He had taken a dinner break with Don Vickers, a friend and company officer, at a fast-food place. “On the second bite of a Big Boy hamburger,” just as he was explaining to Don that the physics of NMR precluded imaging, in midsentence, he found the principle of MRI. “I realized that inhomogeneous magnetic fields labeled signals according to their spatial coordinates, and made a leap of faith to the conclusion that the information could be recovered in the form of images.”3 He sketched the general idea to Don. “Heck, you could make pictures with this thing!” Don was astonished by how completely different Paul’s ideas were from what all spectroscopists had previously been doing. Paul ran out to buy a notebook at a nearby drugstore. He spent much of the night refining his thoughts and convincing himself that he was not just on a wild goose chase, and by morning the book was bursting with ideas. “The Notebook,” as I call it, not only describes the principle of MRI but also predicts a great deal of its development during the next twenty-five years, and on into the future. Its title is “Spatially Resolved Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Experiments.” It begins: The distribution of magnetic nuclei such as protons, and their relaxation times and diffusion coefficients, may be obtained by imposing magnetic field gradients . . . on a sample, such as an organism or a manufactured object, and measuring the [54.147.17.95] Project MUSE (2024-03...