Paul Lauterbur

Paul Lauterbur (1929-2007) was an American chemist from Sidney, Ohio, whose work in the 1970s made magnetic resonance imaging possible. Nuclei in a magnetic field respond to radio waves of characteristic frequencies, and by introducing variations in the magnetic field he showed how that response could be used to build images of the interior of the human body from the differing water content of tissues. He studied chemistry at the Case Institute of Technology, worked at the Mellon Institute laboratories of Dow Corning, and later became a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, before moving in the 1980s to the University of Illinois at Urbana. He shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging.