© Austin Elliott 2004

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.55.12

Austin Elliott (AE)  Did you and [British Laureate] Peter Mansfield actually do some of the work together? In Britain it was implied in some news stories that you did.

Paul Lauterbur (PL) No, that’s not true. At one time it was very useful to visit Nottingham, not only because Peter Mansfield was there – who I could talk to a little, but we never worked together – but Raymond Andrew* was also there, [although] he was a rather high and mighty professor and dean who did not talk to mere mortals in general.

The only intense interaction I had with Peter Mansfield was when we were trying to arrange a fellowship for a junior member of the Department. I had to carry out the negotiations between Raymond Andrew and Peter, who did not get along well, but worked in the same department. So I went from Peter’s office to another part of the building to talk to Raymond and then tried to negotiate back and forth, which at the time I likened to negotiations between Israel and Egypt.

* E Raymond Andrew FRS (1921-2001), NMR Pioneer and Professor of Physics in Nottingham 1964-1983 

AE So when did you first become aware of Peter Mansfield and his work then, just through reading papers?

PL I heard that he had made some sort of a presentation, in Tallinn in Estonia, late in 1973, from a colleague who had been at a physics meeting there. It was reported that [Peter Mansfield’s work] was similar to mine, but it was clear Peter had never read my paper – he doesn’t read the contemporary literature in any case, and was very shocked and surprised that there was something similar in press! It was clear from reading Peter’s first papers that [his work] came from completely different sources than mine, so they were truly independent ideas in that sense.

AE That’s what I had always thought – that you were two people working independently, but towards similar ends.

PL His ideas came more from his work on complex pulse sequences to do [NMR] spectroscopic work on solids and mine came from work on ordinary high resolution NMR. [Our work] partly converged later but was quite different then.

AE  What did you actually start out trying to do, as opposed to what you ended up doing?

PL The incentive to develop the ideas [came from] witnessing some studies of rat tumours by a group from Johns Hopkins University. They were doing something which didn’t bother them at all – sacrificing rats and cutting out little pieces of various tissues –and there was speculation going around that this sort of thing could be used to characterise tissue, particularly malignant tissue. As a mere chemist I thought it rather strange that people would envisage a medical procedure in which to diagnose your problem they would cut you up. I was a little bit aware that something like that was done with biopsy samples and microscopic characterisation by pathologists, but I thought [that] was likely to be much more characteristic of infiltration by tumour cells in detail than a broad overall number that referred to the condition of a piece of tissue.

[So] I was observing these experiments, which were somewhat tricky and difficult technically because they relied upon [a kind of NMR technique which was] notoriously susceptible to artefacts of various sorts. There was a laboratory that had done earlier work on behalf of Dr [Raymond] Damadian and I was not at all sure whether the numbers were valid – not because of the people involved but because the techniques involved were those I knew easily gave a source of errors. When I observed these experiments in person [and] saw the results on the machine, I also saw there were large differences in the signals from various tissues as well as those from pathological conditions. And I was thinking that it would be much more promising to follow up on such work if it could be done by taking measurements within a living animal or human being instead of on locally cut-up samples. While thinking about that in the evening of that first day, I realised there was something in principle that would enable you to perhaps achieve that end. But there were many questions to be asked and answered, and so I thought it was a very promising insight but didn’t know that it could actually be a technique yet. And then it occurred to me that there was a chance that it could be made into a practical technique.

AE  That almost counts as a kind of ‘Eureka’ moment.

PL That moment was over dinner that night, having a hamburger in a local fast food restaurant with a friend. I did suddenly realise that there was the beginning of an idea that might be developed into something useful. Not that no-one else had ever used magnetic field gradients before in a one-dimensional way, very specific to the [particular] experiment and with no intimation of generality in the process. But from the very beginning I was thinking of it as a general process, actually. Although the citations often refer to two-dimensional [imaging], that was a more practical way than the natural three-dimensional procedure which was not as easy to implement both technically and mathematically. [Two-dimensional imaging] was really a stop-gap solution.

AE Did you ever identify later a single moment when you knew it was going to work?

PL No, more a moment – which didn’t feel like a really big moment – of realising there was a principle that could be built on to do this. But after that it was a matter of thinking through each of the things that would have to be done if it were to be a practical technique, and that was spread over a period of several weeks at least.

I don’t remember all the details, it was just a matter of working away at the various problems which presented themselves, rather than writing down things as a permanent record for history.

AE In England now people debate a lot whether you can get funded for an idea for a technique as opposed to solving a scientific question. Was it easy to get funded to pursue this?

PL For the first work I did it myself on an existing [NMR] machine in the department, so just my time was involved. Later the first funding was through a mechanism that the NIH had at the time in which they would give a certain small fraction of the institution’s NIH grants to the institution to spread around in whatever way it thought was useful for the early stages of research. So I got probably overall $1000 or $2000 or something from that for very minor things – it was all very cheap at the beginning. All the early tests and the mathematical ideas were done on paper with square grids in which I carried out the mathematics by hand -which again was just my time. There was no funding involved. I remember doing some of those calculations while sitting in dull seminars. I am sure the speaker was very flattered to see someone sitting in the audience looking up at the board occasionally and vigorously writing on a pad of paper, but he didn’t know what I was writing – nothing to do with the seminar!

It was not until I succeeded in getting some actual results, working in my spare time, that I applied for some NIH grant money. The reviewers of the grant, according to what they told me later, said ‘this all sounds crazy’. On the other hand ‘all his other work has been reasonable and normal, so maybe there is more to this than we think’. So they adjourned for the night and went back and looked at my proposal again the next day and decided that maybe there was something to it – they didn’t know quite what. So, essentially, my previous work led to serious consideration of what might have been dismissed without further thought, so that was fortunate for me.

A similar thing happened when I submitted the first manuscript to Nature. It was quickly returned and I wrote a long letter of protest to Nature that they hadn’t understood it. They apparently took another look, assigned it to another reviewer and this reviewer said almost the same as the NIH had done – that I had done good things before, although this seemed crazy. He didn’t understand why it was of significance, but essentially thought it should be published.

There was a similar reaction on the part of people who were given the job by my university of deciding whether or not to patent ideas that were submitted as candidates for patents. They decided that the chance it would ever make any money was much less than the cost of applying for a patent and therefore rejected it. But for that decision we might be holding this interview on my yacht off the Riviera! The scepticism in many quarters was very natural considering what most people (in NMR) were doing and thinking. I don’t mean to imply that these people were unusually lacking in appreciation of new work or were afraid of the unusual. At one time a research fellow working in my own laboratory, actually doing imaging, came into my office one morning, all dishevelled and upset, saying ‘it can’t work, it can’t work’. After calming him down, I tried to explain why his concerns were irrelevant to its working. But he was a trained physicist and could prove to me that it wouldn’t work, even though he was doing it!

There were various other incidents like that, when people with a great deal of experience and good reputations in magnetic resonance claimed that it could not work, or couldn’t be true. [This was because of] reasons people had in their minds that seemed good enough reasons to them but were not actually relevant to the problems that I was working on. That of course is why the problem was still there for me to work on about a quarter of a century after NMR was [first] developed. It was the mental barriers that people had in the way of seeing the possibilities of making images with the signals that had preserved the problem so that I would have a chance to work on it.

AE Of all the scientific and medical applications of MRI there are now, which has surprised you the most?

PL I am surprised by two things and for two different reasons. One is so-called functional MRI and looking at brain activation in various regions. From very early on I thought there might be some physiological change in [active] regions of the brain which might show up in magnetic resonance, but the way in which it developed is quite surprising and the extent to which it is used now is very gratifying. The other was the extent to which heart imaging has become possible, because of the heart being a moving organ, – at least as long as the patient is in a condition where diagnosis is helpful! The idea that [MRI] techniques could be used effectively for a moving part of an organism was something we worked on very early on but it has evolved in a most gratifying way, further than I thought it could go.

AE The growth in use of the technology in medicine is amazing. Are you surprised by its extent?

PL About the practical applications. First of all it is hard to say whether I am surprised or not about the worldwide extent. Obviously if it worked out at all it would get wide usage. On the technical side the almost universal use of superconducting magnets for human whole body imaging has been a surprise.

At the time I originally thought of these ideas it was not even certain if any kind of magnet could be made with the properties necessary for doing such an experiment. That superconducting devices could be scaled up to that size was surprising for a couple of reasons, one technical, the other financial. It took a while for the potential usefulness of the developments and the improvement in the technology for making superconducting magnets to come together and produce the useful devices that we now know. I remember at one time visiting a manufacturer that had done research on, and built, superconducting devices and meeting there a very senior engineer who was practically in tears. He said: ‘I have been working in this field all my life and nothing has ever worked out -except this. This has worked so well, and is so useful to the world, that I feel that my whole life was not wasted’.

AE  I believe that there are now scanners you can stand up in.

PL Whether that will be of any practical use for anyone, no-one knows yet. What has had an impact is the designs that provide a more open environment than the usual tube that gives many people claustrophobic reactions. The designs work at lower field but provide more room to look around during the procedures; ‘a mother can hold her child’s hand’ like the adverts say, and larger people can fit into them. The mainstream MRI scanners were deliberately engineered to be as economical and practical as possible. Sort of like aircraft seats, which to save money are made a little bit small for most people. So [scanning anyone] over average size is difficult -athletes, pregnant women, overweight people, or just those who have the misfortune to grow up a bit larger than most of us. What new designs for magnets in general will be accepted by the medical profession and be practical I don’t know. My reason for scepticism about the vertical walk-in design is that for most purposes it is desirable to have the patient very quiet – it is a lot easier to be quiet lying down than standing and fidgeting. The combination of fast scanning by using Peter Mansfield’s techniques, and very high field magnets for greater sensitivity, could make unconventional arrangements more practical, but this is for the future to decide.

AE Many of the stories about Peter Mansfield in England have emphasised that one of the things that is unusual about him is that he didn’t go straight to university, but had a kind of technical engineering apprenticeship background.

PL I didn’t know this about Peter Mansfield until I read the newspapers recently. After my undergraduate degree I went to work directly in a research institute instead of going to graduate school because, for one thing, I had had enough of sitting in lectures and listening to professors. I couldn’t actually imagine ever being a professor, and then I was turned into one later. But at the research institute where I worked you could also take classes at the same time at the University of Pittsburgh graduate school and so I began working part-time on a graduate degree at Pittsburgh and shortly after I started on that there was a diversion when I was drafted into the army for about two years.

When I returned to graduate school I continued to work on my degree part-time. The professor I was working with on a joint programme between chemistry and physics – he was in physics, I was in chemistry – decided he was bored with the research he was doing and left the University. So I was left without a graduate advisor. Since no-one else was interested in the work I was doing, my department head very kindly offered to allow me to continue [and said] he would continue to take care of the necessary official documentation, while I just supervised my own research, which he had no confidence in himself. So I did most of my research without a graduate supervisor. My work attracted notice and eventually I almost received a job offer from a major university [until] someone there found out I didn’t have a [Ph.D.] degree, and the job offer never materialized. This brought home to me that I should get my credentials. So I finished up my thesis by stapling together a number of publications I already had and ended up with a graduate degree. At the same time I was being considered for a number of other jobs, industrial and academic, and someone from industry asked me why I would chose to take this academic job when I could have a much more interesting and challenging job in industry. I told them simply that if I took the academic job it would be because in a [university] position I could do any silly thing I wanted to do rather than the job the company had for me. And eventually I did, which worked out very well.

AE  Where did you serve in the US army, and what did you do?

PL I was classified by the army in one sense as a misfit. They had people with graduate degrees, people with high test scores in the entrance examination, people who were almost illiterate. We received only an abbreviated basic training, then I was assigned, because of my degree and experience, to the Army Chemical Centre, which was devoted to chemical warfare and related topics.

Some [of us] had been drafted in the middle of graduate school, so we worked in the army laboratories where our nominal superiors were civil servants who in general did not have modern training and experience because they had been hired some years before. Because the people they were drafting were very much up to date, those people de facto ran the operation, although they had to get official permission for everything they did.

While I was there the army acquired an NMR spectrometer, [apparently] because they happened to have unspent in the budget at the end of the fiscal year just enough money to buy one. Having leftover money in a Government budget is not something to be taken lightly, as generally you will have that much cut out of next year’s budget. So there was an urgent need to spend it in a hurry, and they spent it all on an NMR machine. I found out from one of my friends in the barracks that this was happening [and] because I had some connection with reading and seminars about NMR – but no practical experience – I was able to get myself assigned to that laboratory…

AE  And the rest is history.

PL Well, I still had to get some practical experience! Parts of the machine were immediately returned to the manufacturers [to be upgraded]. While I was waiting for the parts to be returned I did as complete a survey as I could of the literature, which at that time consisted almost entirely of work by physicists on the magnetic moments of nuclei and added up to perhaps 400 references on punch cards. This gave me more background than I had before.

When the parts came back I had a chance to do some practical experimental work on chemical warfare agents which was a bit dangerous but provided some interesting moments scientifically as well.

AE You have won a lot of awards and been honoured before in various ways – I remember there used to be a picture on your office wall of you with President Reagan. Of course, the Nobel must be special …

Joan Dawson  No, that picture was on my wall!

PL I was told for many years that the work was certainly a candidate for a Nobel but that could be said of many things and many people. Stories get around that you have been nominated, though you are never supposed to hear, but people gossip. I knew that I had been nominated, but that is very different from actually being awarded the prize, so when Joan took the telephone call in October at 3.30 in the morning it was a surprise. Not a surprise that it ever happened, but a surprise that it had happened this year. There is a lot of good work and a lot of good people out there, and the Nobel Committee can only honour a few.

AE  Has it changed your life?

PL  It has changed Joan’s life!

Joan Dawson I have not had a moment since that call early in October! Paul does not have a secretary or admin assistant so I have been trying to take care of all the arrangements, keep track of all the reporters, get back to them, and so on.

PL  Yes it has involved about 200% of Joan’s time.

AE  Last question. Have you had to have a protocol lesson about meeting the King of Sweden?

PL We have a Nobel Attendant and get a ‘walk through’ for all of it. They assign someone to each Laureate to make sure you don’t wander away or do something wrong. Who knows what can happen to a stranger in Stockholm if they are not watched!