Paul Lauterbur

Paul Lauterbur shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the insight that turned nuclear magnetic resonance into a way of seeing inside the human body. Born in Sidney, Ohio in 1929, he built a laboratory in his parents' basement as a boy, took a chemistry degree at Case Institute of Technology, and worked at the Mellon Institute, where he was assigned to an early NMR spectrometer. Drafted into the Army in the 1950s, he was posted to a laboratory with an NMR machine and published four papers during his service. NMR was by then a standard chemical tool: place a sample in a strong uniform magnetic field, and its nuclei resonate at frequencies that reveal molecular structure. It produced spectra, not pictures. In 1971, over a hamburger at a restaurant near Stony Brook, Lauterbur worked out how to get spatial information from it. If the magnetic field is made deliberately non-uniform — a gradient superimposed across the sample — then the resonance frequency of a nucleus depends on where it is. Taking readings with the gradient applied along several directions, and reconstructing them mathematically as a tomographic projection, yields an image. He wrote it down that evening and had the waitress witness the notebook. Nature rejected the paper initially; it appeared in 1973, showing images of two tubes of water. Peter Mansfield, who shared the prize, supplied the mathematics and the fast echo-planar technique that made scans practical rather than hours long. Lauterbur moved to the University of Illinois in 1985. He deliberately did not patent the invention. He died in 2007.

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