Lauterbur was a professor atStony Brook University from 1963 until 1985, where he conducted his research for the development of theMRI.[3] In 1985 he became a professor along with his wife Joan Dawson at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 22 years until his death inUrbana. He and Dawson established the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory (BMRL) there.[4] He 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.[5]
Lauterbur was ofLuxembourgish ancestry. Born and raised inSidney, Ohio, Lauterbur graduated fromSidney High School, where a new Chemistry, Physics, and Biology wing was dedicated in his honor. As ateenager, he built his ownlaboratory in the basement of his parents' house.[6] Hischemistry teacher at school understood that he enjoyed experimenting on his own, so the teacher allowed him to do his own experiments at the back of class.[6]
When he was drafted into theUnited States Army in the 1950s, his superiors allowed him to spend his time working on an earlynuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machine; he had published four scientific papers by the time he left the Army.[6] Paul became anatheist later on.[7]
Lauterbur received a BS in chemistry from the Case Institute of Technology, now part ofCase Western Reserve University inCleveland, Ohio where he became a Brother of the Alpha Delta chapter ofPhi Kappa Tau fraternity. He then went to work at the Mellon Institute laboratories of theDow Corning Corporation, with a 2-year break to serve at the Army Chemical Center inEdgewood, Maryland. While working at Mellon Institute he pursued graduate studies in chemistry at theUniversity of Pittsburgh. Earning his PhD in 1962, the following year Lauterbur accepted a position as associate professor atStony Brook University. As a visiting faculty in chemistry atStanford University during the 1969–1970 academic year, he undertook NMR-related research with the help of local businessesSyntex andVarian Associates. Lauterbur returned to Stony Brook, continuing there until 1985 when he moved to theUniversity of Illinois.[8]
TheNobel Prize in Physics in 1952, which went toFelix Bloch andEdward Purcell, was for the development ofnuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), the scientific principle behind MRI. However, for decades magnetic resonance was used mainly for studying thechemical structure of substances. It wasn't until the 1970s with Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR could be used to produce images of the body.
Lauterbur used the idea ofRobert Gabillard (developed in his doctoral thesis, 1952) of introducing gradients in themagnetic field which allows for determining the origin of theradio waves emitted from thenuclei of the object of study. This spatial information allows two-dimensional pictures to be produced.[6]
Raymond Damadian's 1971Science paper on his observation of T1 and T2 differences in cancerous tissue[12] was influential, as Lauterbur wrote in 1986, "… the attention of the medical community was first attracted by the report of Damadian[12] that some animal tumors have remarkably long water proton relaxation times... I wondered whether there might be some way to noninvasively map out such quantities within the body."[13] Prompted by Damadian's report on the potential medical uses of NMR, Lautebur expanded onHerman Carr's technique[14] on creating a one-dimensional magnetic resonance (MR) image to develop a way to generate the first MRI images, in 2D and 3D, using gradients.
While Lauterbur conducted his work at Stony Brook, the best NMR machine on campus belonged to the chemistry department; he had to visit it at night to use it for experimentation and would carefully change the settings so that they would return to those of the chemists' as he left.[15] The original MRI machine is located at the Chemistry building on the campus of Stony Brook University inStony Brook, New York.
Some of the first images taken by Lauterbur included those of a 4-mm-diameter clam[16] his daughter had collected on the beach at theLong Island Sound, green peppers[6] 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. This last achievement is particularly important as the human body consists mostly of water.[15]
When Lauterbur first submitted his paper with his discoveries toNature, the paper was rejected by the editors of the journal. Lauterbur persisted and requested them to review it again, upon which time it was published and is now acknowledged as a classicNature paper.[17] TheNature editors pointed out that the pictures accompanying the paper were too fuzzy, although they were the first images to show the difference between heavy water and ordinary water.[6] Lauterbur said of the initial rejection: "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected byScience orNature."[15]
Peter Mansfield of theUniversity of Nottingham in theUnited Kingdom took Lauterbur's initial work another step further, replacing the slow (and prone to artefacts) projection-reconstruction method used by Lautebur's original technique with a method that used frequency and phase encoding by spatial gradients of magnetic field. Owing toLarmor precession, a mathematical technique called aFourier transformation could then be used to recover the desired image, greatly speeding up the imaging process.[15]
Lauterbur unsuccessfully attempted to file patents related to his work to commercialize the discovery.[18] TheState University of New York chose not to pursue patents, with the rationale that the expense would not pay off in the end. "The company that was in charge of such applications decided that it would not repay the expense of getting a patent. That turned out not to be a spectacularly good decision," Lauterbur said in 2003. He 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.[19] The University of Nottingham did file patents which later made Mansfield wealthy.[19]
Lauterbur was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Mansfield in the fall of 2003. Controversy occurred whenRaymond Damadian took out full-page ads inThe New York Times,The Washington Post andThe Los Angeles Times headlined "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted" saying that the Nobel committee had not included him as a Prize winner alongside Lauterbur and Mansfield for his early work on the MRI. Damadian claimed that he discovered MRI and the two Nobel-winning scientists refined his technology.
The New York Times published an editorial saying that while scientists credit Damadian for holding an early patent in MRI technology, Lauterbur and Mansfield expanded uponHerman Carr's technique in order to produce first 2D and then 3D MR images. The editorial deems this to be worthy of a Nobel prize even though it states clearly in Alfred Nobel's will that prizes are not to be given out solely on the basis of improving an existing technology for commercial use. The newspaper then points out a few cases in which precursor discoveries had been awarded with a Nobel, along with a few deserving cases in which it had not, such asRosalind Franklin,Oswald Avery,Robert Gabillard [fr].[20][21]
Lauterbur died aged 77 in March 2007 ofkidney disease at his home inUrbana, Illinois. University of Illinois ChancellorRichard Herman said, "Paul's influence is felt around the world every day, every time an MRI saves the life of a daughter or a son, a mother or a father."[21]
^Rinck, Peter A. (2025).Magnetic Resonance in Medicine: A Critical Introduction (14th edition, revised, 2025 (eBook) ed.). TRTF – The Round Table Foundation: TwinTree Media.ISBN978-628-01-2260-1."Magnetic Resonance in Medicine".www.magnetic-resonance.org.
^Dawson, M. Joan. Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013. Print. "Paul became an atheist, revering intellectual honesty and the quest for truth."
^Lauterbur, Paul C. (2003)."Autobiography".Nobel Prize official website. Retrieved11 October 2012.
^Gill, Cindy (Fall 2004)."Magnetic Personality".Pitt Magazine. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh. Archived fromthe original on 2010-06-17. Retrieved2010-06-19.
^abDamadian, R. V. "Tumor Detection by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance",Science171(3976):1151–1153, March 19, 1971 | doi:10.1126/science.171.3976.1151.
^Lauterbur, P. C. "Cancer detection by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Zeugmatographic Imaging",Cancer57:1899–1904, May 15, 1986 | doi:10.1002/1097-0142(19860515)57:10<1899::AID-CNCR2820571002>3.0.CO;2-4.
