14 Facts About Paul Lauterbur

Paul Christian Lauterbur 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 possible.

Paul Lauterbur 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.

Paul Lauterbur received a BS in chemistry from the Case Institute of Technology, 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.

Paul Lauterbur 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.

Paul Lauterbur returned to Stony Brook, continuing there until 1985 when he moved to the University of Illinois.

Paul 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.

Paul Lauterbur used the idea of Robert Gabillard 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.

Some first images taken by Paul Lauterbur included those of a 4-mm-diameter clam his daughter had collected on the beach at the Long Island Sound, green peppers 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.

When Paul Lauterbur first submitted his paper with his discoveries to Nature, the paper was rejected by the editors of the journal.

Paul Lauterbur persisted and requested them to review it again, upon which time it was published and is acknowledged as a classic Nature paper.

Paul Lauterbur unsuccessfully attempted to file patents related to his work to commercialize the discovery.

Paul Lauterbur 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.

Paul Lauterbur was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Mansfield in the fall of 2003.

Paul Lauterbur died aged 77 in March 2007 of kidney disease at his home in Urbana, Illinois.