Paul Lauterbur

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Christian Lauterbur, (born May 6, 1929) is 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. Born and raised in Sidney, Ohio, Lauterbur graduated from Sidney High School. He did his undergraduate work at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Lauterbur is a 1962 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and credits the idea of the MRI to a brainstorm one day at a suburban Pittsburgh diner, the MRI's first model being scribbled on a table napkin. [1]. The further research that led to the Nobel Prize was performed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook^[2] in the 1970s. Dr. Lauterbur is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ironically, another Ohio-born inventor, Charles Kettering, was a proponent of the use of magnetism in medical diagnostics decades earlier.

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 is credited for the idea 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.

His original MRI machine is located at the Chemistry building on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in Stony Brook, New York.