Paul C. Lauterbur Biography

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World of Chemistry on Paul C. Lauterbur

Paul C. Lauterbur invented and developed the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to create images of organs and other tissues in the human body.Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as it is also called, has become an important tool in modern medicine as it offers a method for looking at soft tissues in the body without the use of X rays or surgery.

Paul Christian Lauterbur was born on May 6, 1929, in Sidney, Ohio, to Edward Joseph Lauterbur, a mechanical engineer, and Gertrude Wagner Lauterbur, a homemaker. The oldest of three children, Paul's brother, Edward Jospeh II, died at the age of sixteen. He also has a younger sister, Margaret McDonough.

In an interview with Lee Katterman, Lauterbur said that he spent his entire childhood in Sidney, Ohio. He was interested in all kinds of science, and he credits an aunt, Anna Pauline Lauterbur, a schoolteacher, as an important resource in helping him satisfy his curiosity. He attended the Case Institute of Technology (now part of Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland, where he majored in chemistry. After graduating from Case Institute in 1951, Lauterbur moved to Pittsburgh where he joined a research group at the Mellon Institute. He pursued his interest in organosilicon chemistry, the study of organic compounds primarily composed of carbon, hydrogen, and silicon. The Mellon Institute was affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh, so in addition to his research Lauterbur began to take graduate classes on a part-time basis.

In 1953 Lauterbur was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the service's Army Chemical Center Medical Laboratories in Edgewood, Maryland. For the next two years, he helped establish the army's first nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy laboratory. NMR machines, only recently available from commercial sources, were proving to be valuable tools for determining the structure of chemical compounds. In nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy , a chemical compound is exposed to a magnetic field and a radio signal. Certain atoms in the compound, such as hydrogen, carbon 13, and fluorine 19, then absorb energy in patterns that provide information about the arrangement of these atoms.

After his stint in the army, Lauterbur returned to the Mellon Institute in 1955 on the condition that it buy an NMR machine. He organized an NMR laboratory at the institute and continued his research on organosilicon chemistry and the refinement of NMR as an analytical tool. He also took more classes and in 1962 received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1963 Lauterbur moved to New York to become an associate professor of chemistry at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. By now, he was concentrating his research on NMR studies, refining ways that the information obtained using this tool could be used to interpret the structure of chemical compounds. Lauterbur spent the 1969-70 school year on a sabbatical at Stanford University in California. The same year Lauterbur was promoted to professor of chemistry at SUNY, Stony Brook.

Lauterbur said in the interview with Katterman that the idea to use nuclear magnetic resonance to create images came to him during the summer of 1971. Until this time, NMR primarily had been applied to studying molecular structures of individual chemical compounds or simple mixtures. The typical output from an NMR spectrograph was graphical data that required interpretation to help deduce chemical structures. Lauterbur determined that NMR technology could be used to peer inside the human body and produce images that might be used to distinguish tissues or to spot abnormalities representing the early stages of illness. He coined the word zeugmatography to describe the use of NMR for making images. Lauterbur wanted to distinguish his method of image formation and the physics underlying it from other techniques, such as those using X rays, based on other physical properties and principles. Although he first thought of NMR imaging in 1971, his idea did not appear in scientific literature until 1973 after various patent applications could be filed.

Initially Lauterbur spent time confirming that NMR could be used to make images that were reliable and reproducible. He had to make sure that the magnets necessary for whole body studies could be made. Lauterbur also undertook many experiments testing NMR imaging of biological and nonbiological systems. Lauterbur said there were many skeptics of his proposal at first. Some scientists claimed his ideas violated established physical principles. Others said that while the physics might be right, the technique would never be practical. Still others suggested that the medical profession would never accept the new technology. And Lauterbur remembers many rejected grant applications. "Fortunately a few were funded," he told Katterman, and through it all, he remained confident. "Once I thought of it," he said of NMR imaging, "it was clear it would work. I just had to work out the details." After spending some fourteen years developing the idea at the Stony Brook campus, Lauterbur joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he continued his work.

At about the same time that Lauterbur was working on his new NMR techniques, other scientists were developing computerized tomography (CT) scanning, the use of multiple X-ray images to create pictures of two-dimensional "slices" of the body, and this process reached practical use in hospitals ahead of Lauterbur's NMR method. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1990, Lauterbur said that the effect of CT technology had a mixed impact on his own research. "The precedent with X rays had both a negative and positive effect on our work," said Lauterbur. "It was negative in that people looked at CT and asked why we need another expensive imaging medium. A lot of analysts and companies said that. But it was positive in persuading people that a big, expensive medical technology could be worthwhile."

Once it was introduced, magnetic resonance imaging --as Lauterbur's NMR technique is now called--quickly gained wide acceptance as a tool for medical diagnosis. MRI is especially good for contrasting different types of soft tissue clustered together, such as a tumor embedded in healthy brain tissue. It also has the potential for the study of biological function, such as following metabolism in the brain or other organs. Lauterbur and others have been working on a type of microscopy based on nuclear magnetic resonance that may be able to produce images of individual cells in tissue. With this technique, it is becoming possible to look inside thick, opaque tissues or other materials and see structural details that cannot be seen by light microscopy.

Lauterbur has received many awards recognizing his work with NMR. In 1984 he received the prestigious Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award. The following year the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation presented Lauterbur with the Charles F. Kettering Prize, which comes with a $100,000 award and a gold medal. In 1988 he was awarded the National Medal of Science and in 1989 the National Medal of Technology. In 1990 Lauterbur became the first recipient of the Bower Award, a $290,000 prize given by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia. Lauterbur has received honorary degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, l'Université de L'Etat à Liège in Belgium, and Nicolaus Copernicus Medical School in Kraków, Poland.

Lauterbur married M. Joan Dawson in 1984 and has one child, Mary Elise, from the marriage. He also has two children, Daniel and Sharyn, from a previous marriage to Rose Mary Caputo.