Paul Lauterbur published the first magnetic resonance image in a short letter to Nature in 1973 (242, 190-191). The invention of MRI won him many prizes and awards, culminating in the 2003 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine jointly with the British physicist Peter Mansfield. Having gained his Bachelor degree from Case Institute of Technology, he was drafted into the US army where he used an NMR spectrometer for the first time and published several papers. After military service, he completed graduate school and became an Associate Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY), where his Stony Brook laboratory became a focus for others interested in the idea of imaging with NMR.

PDF Obituary 1