American chemist (1929?2007)
Paul Christian Lauterbur
(May 6, 1929 ? March 27, 2007) was an American
chemist
who shared the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
in 2003 with
Peter Mansfield
for his work which made the development of
magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) possible.
[1]
[2]
Lauterbur was a professor at
Stony Brook University
from 1963 until 1985, where he conducted his research for the development of the
MRI
.
[3]
In 1985 he became a professor along with his wife Joan at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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.
[4]
Early life
[
edit
]
Lauterbur was of
Luxembourgish
ancestry. Born and raised in
Sidney, Ohio
, 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
in the basement of his parents' house.
[5]
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.
[5]
When he was drafted into the
United States Army
in the 1953 and was assigned to the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland.
[6]
His superiors allowed him to spend his time working on an early
nuclear magnetic resonance
(NMR) machine; he had published four scientific papers by the time he left the Army.
[5]
Paul became an
atheist
later on.
[7]
Education and career
[
edit
]
Lauterbur earned his 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
fraternity. He then went to work at the Mellon Institute laboratories of the
Dow Corning
Corporation, with a 2-year break to serve at the Army Chemical Center in
Edgewood, Maryland
. While working at Mellon Institute he pursued graduate studies in chemistry at the
University of Pittsburgh
. 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
. Lauterbur returned to Stony Brook, continuing there until 1985 when he moved to the
University of Illinois
.
[8]
The development of the MRI
[
edit
]
Lauterbur credits the idea of the MRI to a brainstorm one day at a suburban
Pittsburgh
Eat'n Park
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
and the
Mellon Institute of Industrial Research
.
[5]
[9]
[10]
The further research that led to the Nobel Prize was performed at
Stony Brook University
[11]
in the 1970s.
The
Nobel Prize in Physics
in 1952, which went to
Felix Bloch
and
Edward Purcell
, was for the development of
nuclear magnetic resonance
(NMR), the scientific principle behind MRI. However, for decades magnetic resonance was used mainly for studying the
chemical structure
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.
[5]
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.
[12]
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
[13]
his daughter had collected on the beach at the
Long Island Sound
, green peppers
[5]
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.
[12]
When Lauterbur first submitted his paper with his discoveries to
Nature
, 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.
[14]
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.
[5]
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
or
Nature
."
[12]
Peter Mansfield of the
University of Nottingham
in the
United Kingdom
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
, a mathematical technique called a
Fourier transformation
could then be used to recover the desired image, greatly speeding up the imaging process.
[12]
Lauterbur unsuccessfully attempted to file patents related to his work to commercialize the discovery.
[15]
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.
[16]
The University of Nottingham did file patents which later made Mansfield wealthy.
[16]
Nobel Prize
[
edit
]
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 Washington Post
and
The Los Angeles Times
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
,
Robert Gabillard
[
fr
]
.
[17]
[18]
Death
[
edit
]
Lauterbur died aged 77 in March 2007 of
kidney disease
at his home in
Urbana, Illinois
. 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."
[18]
Other awards and honors
[
edit
]
- Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research
, 1984
- General Motors Cancer Research Foundation
Kettering Prize
, 1985
- Gairdner Foundation International Award
, 1985
- The
Harvey Prize
, 1986
- National Medal of Science
, 1987
- Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award
, 1987
- National Medal of Technology
, 1988, (with Raymond Damadian)
[15]
- Bower Award,
Franklin Institute
of Philadelphia, 1990 (first recipient)
- Carnegie Mellon
Dickson Prize in Science
in 1993.
[4]
- NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society
of the
National Academy of Sciences
, 2001
[19]
- Charter member,
Phi Kappa Tau
Hall of Fame in 2006.
- National Inventors Hall of Fame
, class of 2007
- Asteroid
255598 Paullauterbur
, discovered by Italian amateur astronomer
Silvano Casulli
in 2006, was named in his honor.
[20]
The official
naming citation
was published by the
Minor Planet Center
on January 12, 2017 (
M.P.C.
103028
).
[21]
- Stony Brook University named a student residence after Lauterbur in 2010.
[22]
Honorary Degrees
[
edit
]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Rinck, Peter A. (2022).
The History of MRI. in:Magnetic Resonance In Medicine: A Critical Introduction
(12th ed.).
Norderstedt
: BoD GmbH.
ISBN
978-3-7460-9518-9
.
Archived
from the original on April 18, 2023
. Retrieved
April 26,
2023
.
- ^
Filler, Aaron (2009).
"The History, Development and Impact of Computed Imaging in Neurological Diagnosis and Neurosurgery: CT, MRI, and DTI"
.
Nature Precedings
.
doi
:
10.1038/npre.2009.3267.4
.
- ^
P. C. Lauterbur (1973). "Image Formation by Induced Local Interaction; Examples Employing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance".
Nature
.
242
(5394): 190?191.
Bibcode
:
1973Natur.242..190L
.
doi
:
10.1038/242190a0
.
S2CID
4176060
.
- ^
a
b
Spice, Byron (October 7, 2003).
"Nobel Prize for MRI began with a burger in New Kensington"
.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
.
Archived
from the original on June 29, 2011
. Retrieved
August 5,
2007
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
"Paul Lauterbur"
.
The Economist
. April 7, 2007.
Archived
from the original on August 21, 2007
. Retrieved
August 4,
2007
.
- ^
"68 More From Area Inducted Into Army"
Archived
December 10, 2022, at the
Wayback Machine
,
The Cincinnati Post
, Cincinnati, Ohio, volume 72, number 188, August 21, 1953, page 8.
(subscription required)
- ^
Dawson, M. Joan. Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2013. Print. "Paul became an atheist, revering intellectual honesty and the quest for truth."
- ^
Lauterbur, Paul C. (2003).
"Autobiography"
.
Nobel Prize official website
.
Archived
from the original on August 2, 2012
. Retrieved
October 11,
2012
.
- ^
Gill, Cindy (Fall 2004).
"Magnetic Personality"
.
Pitt Magazine
. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh. Archived from
the original
on June 17, 2010
. Retrieved
June 19,
2010
.
- ^
Prasad, Amit (March 14, 2014).
Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India
. MIT Press. p. 17.
ISBN
9780262026956
.
- ^
"Nobel Prize Awardee Paul Lauterbur Returns To SBU Where His Winning Research Was Conducted In The '70s"
.
Archived
from the original on December 2, 2005
. Retrieved
January 22,
2006
.
- ^
a
b
c
d
Wade, Nicholas (October 7, 2003).
"American and Briton Win Nobel for Using Chemists' Test for M.R.I.'s"
.
The New York Times
. Retrieved
August 4,
2007
.
- ^
Becker, Edwin D. (July 2007).
"Obituary: Paul Christian Lauterbur"
.
Physics Today
.
60
(7): 77?78.
Bibcode
:
2007PhT....60g..77B
.
doi
:
10.1063/1.2761815
.
- ^
"MRI ? a new way of seeing"
.
Nature
.
Archived
from the original on May 18, 2016
. Retrieved
August 4,
2007
.
- ^
a
b
Deutsch, Claudia (April 7, 2007).
"Patent Fights Aplenty for M.R.I. Pioneer"
.
New York Times
.
Archived
from the original on October 14, 2007
. Retrieved
August 4,
2007
.
- ^
a
b
Maugh, Thomas (April 7, 2007).
"Paul Lauterbur, 77; 'the father of MRI'
"
.
Los Angeles Times
.
Archived
from the original on May 22, 2011
. Retrieved
August 4,
2007
.
- ^
Judson, Horace (October 20, 2003).
"No Nobel Prize for Whining"
.
New York Times
.
Archived
from the original on May 6, 2021
. Retrieved
May 4,
2018
.
- ^
a
b
Chang, Kenneth (March 28, 2007).
"Paul Lauterbur, MRI pioneer and Nobel Laureate, dies"
. International Herald Tribune (now New York Times International Edition).
Archived
from the original on May 5, 2018
. Retrieved
May 4,
2018
.
- ^
"NAS Award for Chemistry in Service to Society"
. National Academy of Sciences. Archived from
the original
on December 29, 2010
. Retrieved
March 14,
2011
.
- ^
"255598 Paullauterbur (2006 PE1)"
.
Minor Planet Center
.
Archived
from the original on January 31, 2017
. Retrieved
September 3,
2019
.
- ^
"MPC/MPO/MPS Archive"
.
Minor Planet Center
.
Archived
from the original on April 26, 2020
. Retrieved
September 3,
2019
.
- ^
"Stony Brook University Residence Halls & Student Center"
.
Design and Build with Metal
.
Archived
from the original on December 1, 2022
. Retrieved
1 December
2022
.
Further reading
[
edit
]
- Dawson, M. Joan.
Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI,
Boston: MIT Press, 2013.
ISBN
9780262019217
- "Paul C. Lauterbur ? Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB.
[1]
External links
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