Paul Lauterbur, 77; Nobel laureate called 'father of MRI'

LOS ANGELES -- Chemist Paul C. Lauterbur, who received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for giving physicians the ability to look inside the human body without using harmful radiation, died yesterday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 77 and had kidney disease.

Dr. Lauterbur played a key role in the development of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, which produces highly detailed images of soft tissues and organs without using X-rays.

The first MRI instruments became available in the early 1980s; now, 60 million MRI examinations are performed each year.

The technique is particularly valuable for imaging the brain and spinal cord, monitoring the progress of diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and assessing damage to knees and other joints.

"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," Richard Herman, chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Dr. Lauterbur was a professor, said in a statement.

MRI relies on the magnetic properties of the hydrogen in water, which accounts for about two-thirds of the human body. When the hydrogen atoms are placed in a powerful magnetic field and bombarded with radio waves, they emit radio signals that provide information about their local environment.

Before Dr. Lauterbur's work at State University of New York at Stony Brook, chemists used this technique, called nuclear magnetic resonance, to help determine the structure of organic molecules.

Dr. Lauterbur's inspiration -- conceived at a restaurant table and sketched out on a napkin -- was to establish a gradient in the field, varying its intensity at different points in the sample. That made it possible to determine where each atom was in relation to the others.

His thought processes were unique, said chemist John D. Baldeschwieler, of California Institute of Technology. "For years, everyone in the field was trying to get the most homogeneous field in order to get the highest possible resolution," he said. "Lauterbur thought about the problem in a completely inverse way. If you didn't have a homogeneous field, but a gradient, then the frequency would indicate position in space."

Assembling his apparatus, Dr. Lauterbur placed a test tube inside and startled his colleagues with a faint picture. His first living subject was a clam taken from nearby Long Island Sound.

In his original publication in the journal Nature, he called the new technique zeugmatography -- from the Greek zeugma, or yoke -- because it yoked together two different types of radiation, magnetic and radiofrequency.

That name did not last. Marketers also avoided "nuclear" in the name for fear it would invoke images of lethal radiation.

British physicist Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham, who shared the 2003 Nobel Prize with Dr. Lauterbur, devised techniques for sequentially altering the magnetic gradient so the device could produce an image of a two-dimensional slice of the human body. He also perfected techniques to accelerate the process, cutting the required time for producing an image from hours to seconds.

Dr. Lauterbur's university decided not to file patent applications based on his work. "The company that was in charge of such applications decided that it would not repay the expense of getting a patent," Dr. Lauterbur said in 2003. "That turned out not to be a spectacularly good decision."

The University of Nottingham did file patents, however, and Mansfield became wealthy enough to donate a new MRI center to the university.

Dr. Lauterbur tried for years to get the federal government, particularly the National Institutes of Health, to fund a prototype of the instrument to image people, according to Baldeschwieler. "It was an extraordinarily bold step. Nobody thought such a thing would be possible," he said.

It took Dr. Lauterbur nearly a decade to get the funds and complete the instrument.

Once the technique was perfected, Dr. Lauterbur traveled around the world promoting its advantages, said medical physicist Paul Bottomley of Johns Hopkins University. "It was an orphan technology, not in the mainstream of physics or chemistry, and not in mainstream radiology either," he said. "Radiologists thought MRI could never replace computed tomography." Dr. Lauterbur convinced them otherwise.

Meanwhile, he kept at work in his laboratory, inventing a variety of refinements, including MRI contrast agents and techniques to obtain chemical information from specific sites in the body.

"He was really the father of MRI," Bottomley said.

Paul Christian Lauterbur was born May 6, 1929, in Sidney, Ohio. His earliest inspirations, he said, were his aunt Anna Lauterbur, who gave him a subscription to Natural History magazine and fed his interest in the world around him, and a high school chemistry teacher who allowed him and other advanced students to conduct experiments while the rest of the class received a lecture.

He enrolled at Case Institute of Technology, now part of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, on the recommendation of his father, who said that he didn't know what scientists did for a living but that engineers could always get a job.

Despite that recommendation, he chose chemistry as a major.

His marriage to Rose Mary Caputo ended in divorce.

Dr. Lauterbur leaves his wife, Joan; a son and daughter from his first marriage, Daniel of Perry, Mich., and Sharyn Lauterbur-DiGeronimo of Selden, N.Y.; and a daughter from his second marriage, Elise, a student at Oberlin College in Ohio.

Correction: Yesterday's obituary of Nobel laureate Paul C. Lauterbur, written by the Los Angeles Times, wrongly identified him as a physicist. Dr. Lauterbur was a chemist.