Peter Mansfield

Peter Mansfield shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for making magnetic resonance imaging fast enough to be clinically useful. Born in London in 1933 to a gas fitter, he was evacuated during the Blitz, and was told by a careers adviser at fifteen that science was not for him. He left school and worked as a printer's assistant, then in a rocket propulsion department at Woolwich, where colleagues encouraged him to study. He took A-levels at night, entered Queen Mary College at twenty-six, and completed a doctorate on nuclear magnetic resonance in solids in 1962. After two years in Illinois he joined the University of Nottingham in 1964, where he remained. His work on NMR in crystals led him to the same question Paul Lauterbur reached independently: how to extract spatial information from a resonance signal. Mansfield's contribution was mathematical and technical rather than conceptual. He showed how the signal could be analysed rigorously using Fourier methods to reconstruct an image, and how selective excitation could isolate a single slice. The decisive advance was echo-planar imaging, which he proposed in 1977. Conventional acquisition took hours; echo-planar collects an entire image from a single excitation by rapidly switching gradients, cutting the time to a fraction of a second. That is what allows scans of a beating heart, of a moving fetus, and functional imaging of brain activity. He tested the technique on himself in 1978, lying inside a whole-body magnet when colleagues considered it risky, and produced the first image of a live human abdomen. He was knighted in 1993, and campaigned against unfounded claims that MRI was hazardous. He died in 2017.

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