MIT PRESS, AUGUST 2013Life is so strange. It was because of the tortured history of NMR Specialties that Paul happened to be on hand to witness the experiments that raised in his mind the possibility of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Paul was always squeamish about everything medical and biological, everything that had to do with blood and other tissues. He was loath to go to doctors and totally intimidated by the idea that he might have to have an injection or to have blood drawn. So finding a way to do NMR studies noninvasively took on a special meaning for him.
But how? The nuclear magnetic resonance signal is governed by the simple Larmor equation, which holds that the frequency of the signal is proportional to the strength of the applied magnetic field. Paul’s initial insight about NMR imaging was one brilliant flash of an idea: Gradients of magnetic field applied across the sample would localize any spatial position. This was the key. It is of some interest that this concept was simply waiting to be discovered since the days when Bloch and Purcell first found the phenomenon of Magnetic Resonance, and that the reaction of many in the NMR community, especially among physicists was that something so simple could not be true. But the new idea, MRI, born on that bite of a Big Boy ...
