Papers of Paul C. Lauterbur

Paul C. Lauterbur (1929-2007) is best known for his invention of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 2003. From his earliest days as a child growing up in the Miami Valley, near Dayton, Ohio. Lauterbur exhibited a strong interest in science. In middle school he attempted to make rocket fuel with his chemistry set in his parent's basement. Lauterbur's rocket fuel experiment earned him a trip to the hospital but did nothing dampen his enthusiasm for chemistry. Due to his tendency to receive poor marks in subjects that didn't hold his interest and his heady nature, Lauterbur's parents considered placing him on a mechanical, rather than academic track. They believed it might be better for Lauterbur to have a marketable physical skill. Lauterbur would have missed his career in chemistry if not for his high school teacher, John McDerrmont. McDerrmont allowed Lauterbur to independently study college level chemistry. After placing first in the Ohio state chemistry exams, Lauterbur was assured the opportunity to go to college.

Lauterbur nearly completed an undergraduate degree in Industrial Chemistry at Case Institute of Technology before switching his focus to Chemistry. After graduating in 1951, Lauterbur was hired by Dow Corning to work at their research laboratories at Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh. Lauterbur worked with silicone under Peter Warrick, the inventor of silicone rubber and Silly Putty. Working at the Mellon Institute allowed Lauterbur to take free graduate courses at the University of Pittsburgh. Lauterbur was the first student in a joint physics and chemistry program. He would eventually earn his PhD in 1962, in Chemistry.

After attending a seminar given by Herbert Gutowski, the father of NMR, in chemistry during the 1952-53 school year, Lauterbur decided that he wanted to learn more about how nuclear magnetic resonance was used in chemistry to study molecular compounds. Lauterbur approached Gutowski and suggested a collaborative effort to study synthetic silanes. Before they could begin their work, in 1953 Lauterbur was drafted into the Army.

After first finding himself in a tank battalion, Lauterbur was reassigned to Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, initially tasked with the development of chemical weapons. Despite never having worked with one, Lauterbur convinced the Army that he could operate their new state of the art NMR spectrometer. Over the next thee years, Lauterbur taught himself how to use the NMR spectrometer while reading nearly 400 papers on the state of the field. By the time he was discharged in 1955, Lauterbur was already working on the cutting edge of the field, working with the newly discovered 31 P chemical shifts.

Working once again for Dow Corning and now with his own NMR spectrometer, Lauterbur quickly produced useful spectra of silicon from 29S. As unprecedented as this was, Lauterbur set his sights higher, realizing that his work with 29Si could help him obtain spectra of 13C. Lauterbur's work with 13C proved groundbreaking. This work continues to have applications in organic chemistry, medical diagnosis and the oil and food industries. If Lauterbur never did anything else, he would be known for his work with 13C. It would be another twenty years before Lauterbur's work was repeated and continued by others. Lauterbur's work quickly earned him acclaim in the field.

By 1962, Lauterbur was ready to finish his PhD and leave Dow Corning. In 1963 Lauterbur accepted a position as an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University. After a new chemistry building opened, Lauterbur began to study NMR spectroscopy of protons. Using lessons learned with 13C and aided by increasingly powerful computers Lauterbur obtained the first 13C spectra of a protein crystal while on sabbatical at Stanford in 1969.