Paul C Lauterbur

Abstract

Co-developer of magnetic resonance imaging who shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Born on May 6, 1929, in Sidney, OH, USA, he died, aged 77 years, of kidney disease on March 27, 2007, in Urbana, IL, USA. In 1971, Paul Lauterbur, then a professor of chemistry and radiology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, NY, USA, took a summer job with NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) Specialties. “It was his job to either usher it into bankruptcy or make a go of it”, according to Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, author of Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century (Basic Books, 1997). NMR Specialties was one of the few places that had a large enough instrument to use NMR on biological samples, and Raymond Damadian, a researcher at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn who had published a 1971 Science paper on using conventional NMR to differentiate cancer tissues, took some samples there. That paper spurred Lauterbur to think about using NMR to create images. Conventional NMR uses a uniform magnetic field, but it occurred to Lauterbur that if he used a non-uniform magnetic field (a magnetic field gradient), he would be able to locate where in space the signal arose. “Then the point is that if you change the direction in space in which the magnetic field is non-uniform, it turns out you can reconstruct the three-dimensional image in space”, explained Charles Slichter, who would become a colleague when Lauterbur joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA, in 1985. “This is a fundamental idea”, said Slichter. By 1973, Lauterbur had run out of time trying to patent the idea, first through NMR Specialties, and then through his university. So instead, he submitted a paper on the topic, along with an image of two capillary tubes in a test tube he had obtained using it, to Nature. The journal rejected it, saying Lauterbur wasn't forceful enough in his conclusions. So he revised and resubmitted the paper, coining the phrase “zeugmatography”, from the Greek for “joining together”, referring to joining together a gradient magnetic field and the radiofrequency that corresponds to a single image. Nature published the paper on March 16, 1973. “It was a terrific idea”, said Slichter, with important applications for medicine. Among those who were excited by the paper were Alex Margulis, chair of radiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and engineers at Technicare and General Electric. All set to work creating a viable machine based on it. Peter Mansfield, a physicist at the UK's University of Nottingham, was also working on the idea, completely independently. “When I first proposed the idea of imaging, I hadn't seen Paul's paper”, Mansfield told The Lancet. An audience member at an international conference in Krakow, Poland, pointed it out to him in December, 1973. “There was no obvious relationship between what he was doing and what we were doing”, Mansfield said. The two soon realised there were links between their approaches, however, and Lauterbur began visiting Mansfield's laboratory. “Mansfield independently came up with the idea for the imaging a few months later than Lauterbur, but then he invented a method of imaging that allowed making imaging much more rapidly”, Slichter said. “Together, they had the central ideas that are found in all the imaging machines that work.” By 1980, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines—neither the terms NMR, which the technology is based on, nor Lauterbur's zeugmatography, stuck—were commercially available. Today, MRI machines are used worldwide and have transformed medical imaging. Lauterbur won the 1984 Lasker Award for his work, Mansfield was knighted in 1993, and the pair shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In his Nobel Lecture, Lauterbur said that “the most gratifying experiences emotionally were those when a stranger would volunteer ‘you saved my daughter's life’, or ‘your machine saved me from an unnecessary operation’”. Damadian, who had become well known for his attempts to seek credit for the technology, demanded that he share the Nobel Prize; Lauterbur refused to discuss Damadian then, and even as early as 1992, when Kevles interviewed him for her book. During the past decade, Lauterbur turned his research to the origin of life. He is survived by his second wife, Joan Dawson, and his three children.