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Paul Christian Lauterbur (May 6, 1929 – March 27, 2007) was an American
chemist A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties. Chemists carefully describe t ...
who shared the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded yearly by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute for outstanding discoveries in physiology or medicine. The Nobel Prize is not a single prize, but five separate prizes that, accord ...
in 2003 with
Peter Mansfield Sir Peter Mansfield (9 October 1933 – 8 February 2017) was an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Mansfi ...
for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible.Filler, AG: The history, development, and impact of computed imaging in neurological diagnosis and neurosurgery: CT, MRI, DTI
Nature Precedings
.
Lauterbur was a professor at Stony Brook University from 1963 until 1985, where he conducted his research for the development of the
MRI Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to form pictures of the anatomy and the physiological processes of the body. MRI scanners use strong magnetic fields, magnetic field gradients, and radio waves ...
. In 1985 he became a professor along with his wife Joan at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...
for 22 years until his death in Urbana. He never stopped working with undergraduates on research, and he served as a professor of chemistry, with appointments in bioengineering, biophysics, the College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign and computational biology at the Center for Advanced Study.


Early life

Lauterbur was of
Luxembourgish Luxembourgish ( ; also ''Luxemburgish'', ''Luxembourgian'', ''Letzebu(e)rgesch''; Luxembourgish: ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. As a standard form of th ...
ancestry. Born and raised in
Sidney, Ohio Sidney is a city in Shelby County, Ohio, located approximately 36 mi (58 km) north of Dayton and 100 mi (161 km) south of Toledo. The population was 20,421 at the time of the 2020 census. It is named after English poet Phi ...
, Lauterbur graduated from Sidney High School, where a new Chemistry, Physics, and Biology wing was dedicated in his honor. As a teenager, he built his own
laboratory A laboratory (; ; colloquially lab) is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. Laboratory services are provided in a variety of settings: physic ...
in the basement of his parents' house. His chemistry teacher at school understood that he enjoyed experimenting on his own, so the teacher allowed him to do his own experiments at the back of class. When he was drafted into the
United States Army The United States Army (USA) is the land warfare, land military branch, service branch of the United States Armed Forces. It is one of the eight Uniformed services of the United States, U.S. uniformed services, and is designated as the Army o ...
in the 1953 and was assigned to the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland. His superiors allowed him to spend his time working on an early
nuclear magnetic resonance Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are perturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near field) and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a ...
(NMR) machine; he had published four scientific papers by the time he left the Army. Paul became an atheist later on.


Education and career

Lauterbur received a bachelor of science in industrial chemistry from the Case Institute of Technology in 1951, now part of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where he became a Brother of the Alpha Delta chapter of
Phi Kappa Tau Phi Kappa Tau (), commonly known as Phi Tau (), is a collegiate fraternity located in the United States. The fraternity was founded in 1906. As of November 2022, the fraternity has 161 chartered chapters, 79 active chapters, 6 Associate chapte ...
fraternity. He then went to work at the Mellon Institute laboratories of the
Dow Corning Dow Corning Corporation, was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Midland, Michigan, United States. Originally established as a joint venture between The Dow Chemical Company and Corning Incorporated, Dow bought out Corning and ...
Corporation, with a 2-year break to serve at the Army Chemical Center in
Edgewood, Maryland Edgewood is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Harford County, Maryland, United States. The population was 25,562 at the 2010 census, up from 23,378 in 2000. Geography Edgewood is located in southwestern Harford Coun ...
. While working at Mellon Institute he pursued graduate studies in chemistry at the
University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...
. Earning his PhD in 1962, the following year Lauterbur accepted a position as associate professor at Stony Brook University. As a visiting faculty in chemistry at Stanford University during the 1969–1970 academic year, he undertook NMR-related research with the help of local businesses Syntex and
Varian Associates Varian Associates was one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1948 by Russell H. and Sigurd F. Varian, William Webster Hansen, and Edward Ginzton to sell the klystron, the first vacuum tube which could amplif ...
. Lauterbur returned to Stony Brook, continuing there until 1985 when he moved to the
University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
.


The development of the MRI

Lauterbur credits the idea of the MRI to a brainstorm one day at a suburban
Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...
Eat'n Park Eat'n Park is a restaurant chain based in Homestead, Pennsylvania, with 59 locations in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The chain is known for its Smiley Cookies and has adopted the motto, "the place for smiles". History In the late 1 ...
Big Boy Restaurant, with the MRI's first model scribbled on a table napkin while he was a student and researcher at both the
University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...
and the
Mellon Institute of Industrial Research The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research is a former research institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, which is now part of Carnegie Mellon University. It was founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon as part of the ...
. The further research that led to the Nobel Prize was performed at Stony Brook University in the 1970s. The
Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...
in 1952, which went to
Felix Bloch Felix Bloch (23 October 1905 – 10 September 1983) was a Swiss-American physicist and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for "their development of new ...
and Edward Purcell, was for the development of
nuclear magnetic resonance Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are perturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near field) and respond by producing an electromagnetic signal with a ...
(NMR), the scientific principle behind MRI. However, for decades magnetic resonance was used mainly for studying the
chemical structure A chemical structure determination includes a chemist's specifying the molecular geometry and, when feasible and necessary, the electronic structure of the target molecule or other solid. Molecular geometry refers to the spatial arrangement of ...
of substances. It wasn't until the 1970s with Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR could be used to produce images of the body. Lauterbur used the idea of Robert Gabillard (developed in his doctoral thesis, 1952) of introducing gradients in the magnetic field which allows for determining the origin of the radio waves emitted from the nuclei of the object of study. This spatial information allows two-dimensional pictures to be produced. While Lauterbur conducted his work at Stony Brook, the best NMR machine on campus belonged to the chemistry department; he had to visit it at night to use it for experimentation and would carefully change the settings so that they would return to those of the chemists' as he left. The original MRI machine is located at the Chemistry building on the campus of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York. Some of the first images taken by Lauterbur included those of a 4-mm-diameter clam his daughter had collected on the beach at the Long Island Sound, green peppers and two test tubes of heavy water within a beaker of ordinary water; no other imaging technique in existence at that time could distinguish between two different kinds of water. This last achievement is particularly important as the human body consists mostly of water. When Lauterbur first submitted his paper with his discoveries to ''
Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...
'', the paper was rejected by the editors of the journal. Lauterbur persisted and requested them to review it again, upon which time it was published and is now acknowledged as a classic ''Nature'' paper. The ''Nature'' editors pointed out that the pictures accompanying the paper were too fuzzy, although they were the first images to show the difference between heavy water and ordinary water. Lauterbur said of the initial rejection: "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by ''
Science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...
'' or ''Nature''." Peter Mansfield of the
University of Nottingham , mottoeng = A city is built on wisdom , established = 1798 – teacher training college1881 – University College Nottingham1948 – university status , type = Public , chancellor ...
in the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
took Lauterbur's initial work another step further, replacing the slow (and prone to artefacts) projection-reconstruction method used by Lautebur's original technique with a method that used frequency and phase encoding by spatial gradients of magnetic field. Owing to
Larmor precession In physics, Larmor precession (named after Joseph Larmor) is the precession of the magnetic moment of an object about an external magnetic field. The phenomenon is conceptually similar to the precession of a tilted classical gyroscope in an extern ...
, a mathematical technique called a
Fourier transformation A Fourier transform (FT) is a mathematical transform that decomposes functions into frequency components, which are represented by the output of the transform as a function of frequency. Most commonly functions of time or space are transformed ...
could then be used to recover the desired image, greatly speeding up the imaging process. Lauterbur unsuccessfully attempted to file patents related to his work to commercialize the discovery. The State University of New York chose not to pursue patents, with the rationale that the expense would not pay off in the end. "The company that was in charge of such applications decided that it would not repay the expense of getting a patent. That turned out not to be a spectacularly good decision," Lauterbur said in 2003. He attempted to get the federal government to pay for an early prototype of the MRI machine for years in the 1970s, and the process took a decade. The University of Nottingham did file patents which later made Mansfield wealthy.


Nobel Prize

Lauterbur was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Mansfield in the fall of 2003. Controversy occurred when Raymond Damadian took out full-page ads in ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'', ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'' and ''
The Los Angeles Times ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the ...
'' headlined "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted" saying that the Nobel committee had not included him as a Prize winner alongside Lauterbur and Mansfield for his early work on the MRI. Damadian claimed that he discovered MRI and the two Nobel-winning scientists refined his technology. ''The New York Times'' published an editorial saying that while scientists credit Damadian for holding an early patent in MRI technology, Lauterbur and Mansfield expanded upon Herman Carr's technique in order to produce first 2D and then 3D MR images. The editorial deems this to be worthy of a Nobel prize even though it states clearly in Alfred Nobel's will that prizes are not to be given out solely on the basis of improving an existing technology for commercial use. The newspaper then points out a few cases in which precursor discoveries had been awarded with a Nobel, along with a few deserving cases in which it had not, such as Rosalind Franklin,
Oswald Avery Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. (October 21, 1877 – February 20, 1955) was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecula ...
, .


Death

Lauterbur died aged 77 in March 2007 of kidney disease at his home in
Urbana, Illinois Urbana ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Champaign County, Illinois, United States. As of the 2020 census, Urbana had a population of 38,336. As of the 2010 United States Census, Urbana is the 38th-most populous municipality in Illinois. It ...
. University of Illinois Chancellor Richard Herman said, "Paul's influence is felt around the world every day, every time an MRI saves the life of a daughter or a son, a mother or a father."


Other awards and honors

* Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research, 1984 * General Motors Cancer Research Foundation
Kettering Prize The Charles F. Kettering Prize was a US$250,000 award given by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation for the most outstanding recent contribution to the diagnosis or treatment of cancer. __TOC__ History The award was named in honor of Char ...
, 1985 *
Gairdner Foundation International Award The Canada Gairdner International Award is given annually by the Gairdner Foundation at a special dinner to five individuals for outstanding discoveries or contributions to medical science. Receipt of the Gairdner is traditionally considered a ...
, 1985 *The
Harvey Prize Harvey Prize is an annual Israeli award for breakthroughs in science and technology, as well as contributions to peace in the Middle East granted by the Technion in Haifa. History The prize is named for industrialist and inventor Leo Harvey. T ...
, 1986 *
National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social scienc ...
, 1987 *
National Medal of Technology The National Medal of Technology and Innovation (formerly the National Medal of Technology) is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development ...
, 1988, (with Raymond Damadian) *Bower Award,
Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and the center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memori ...
of Philadelphia, 1990 (first recipient) *
Carnegie Mellon Carnegie may refer to: People *Carnegie (surname), including a list of people with the name *Clan Carnegie, a lowland Scottish clan Institutions Named for Andrew Carnegie * Carnegie Building (Troy, New York), on the campus of Rensselaer Polyte ...
Dickson Prize in Science in 1993. * NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society of the National Academy of Sciences, 2001 *Charter member,
Phi Kappa Tau Phi Kappa Tau (), commonly known as Phi Tau (), is a collegiate fraternity located in the United States. The fraternity was founded in 1906. As of November 2022, the fraternity has 161 chartered chapters, 79 active chapters, 6 Associate chapte ...
Hall of Fame in 2006. *
National Inventors Hall of Fame The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is an American not-for-profit organization, founded in 1973, which recognizes individual engineers and inventors who hold a U.S. patent of significant technology. Besides the Hall of Fame, it also oper ...
, class of 2007 *Asteroid 255598 Paullauterbur, discovered by Italian amateur astronomer
Silvano Casulli __NOTOC__ Vincenzo Silvano Casulli, usually known as Silvano Casulli (25 August 1944 – 24 July 2018
in 2006, was named in his honor. The official was published by the Minor Planet Center on January 12, 2017 (). *Stony Brook University named a student residence after Lauterbur in 2010.


Honorary Degrees

*
Carnegie-Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
in Pittsburgh *
University of Liège The University of Liège (french: Université de Liège), or ULiège, is a major public university of the French Community of Belgium based in Liège, Wallonia, Belgium. Its official language is French. As of 2020, ULiège is ranked in the 301 ...
in Belgium * Nicolaus Copernicus University Medical School in Kraków, Poland


See also

*
Nobel Prize controversies Since the first award in 1901, conferment of the Nobel Prize has occasionally engendered criticismLuxembourg American


References


Further reading

*Dawson, M. Joan. ''Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI,'' Boston: MIT Press, 2013. *"Paul C. Lauterbur – Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB


External links

*Paul C. Lauterbur
Genesis of the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) notebook, September 1971
(all pages freely available for download in variety of formats from
Science History Institute The Science History Institute is an institution that preserves and promotes understanding of the history of science. Located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it includes a library, museum, archive, research center and conference center. It was f ...
Digital Collections a
digital.sciencehistory.org
* including the Nobel Lecture ''All Science is Interdisciplinary – from Magnetic Moments to Molecules to Men''

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20120205213244/http://www.patentgenius.com/inventor/LauterburPaulC.html Paul C. Lauterbur Patents*
Joan Dawson, "Paul Lauterbur", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2012)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lauterbur, Paul 1929 births 2007 deaths 20th-century American chemists American atheists American biophysicists American Nobel laureates American people of Luxembourgian descent IEEE Medal of Honor recipients Winners of the Heineken Prize Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences National Medal of Science laureates National Medal of Technology recipients Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine Nuclear magnetic resonance People from Sidney, Ohio University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty University of Pittsburgh alumni United States Army soldiers Howard N. Potts Medal recipients Recipients of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology