MIT PRESS, AUGUST 2013Thomas Huxley, in his presidential address to the Royal Society in 1885, observed: “What an enormous revolution would be made in biology if physics or chemistry could supply the physiologist with a means of making out the molecular structure of living tissues comparable to that which the spectroscope affords to the inquirer into the nature of heavenly bodies.”
Andrew Huxley, a grandson of Thomas, noted in his own inaugural address in 1980 that his grandfather’s wishes came true with the invention of zeugmatography—better known today as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI—by Paul Lauterbur in 1971. MRI would change the course of medicine. It became a leading diagnostic tool because it images the soft tissues of the body anatomically, biochemically, and functionally. It is noninvasive and safe, and unlike X-rays or CAT scans, uses no ionizing radiation. My recently published book, Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI, is the story of the man, who was my husband, and his invention.
One day in 1971 Paul happened to observe some nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements on normal and malignant tissues and saw that the ...
