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Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI. By M. Joan Dawson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. 246. $27.95.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an essential diagnostic tool for medical practice and much more. American chemist Paul Lauterbur played a key role in conceptualizing the theory of MRI, as well as in leading its subsequent practical development. (Indeed, almost all of his scientific work had to do with MRI.) After graduation from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland in 1951, Lauterbur went to work with Dow Corning in Pittsburgh (in the same laboratory that discovered silly putty). Drafted into the army during the Korean War, he worked with an early NMR spectrometer. After receiving a Ph.D. from Pittsburgh in 1962, Lauterbur leftindustry, believing that "misfits are less tolerated in industry than in academia" (p. 63), and moved to the new State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY) in 1963. There he did early fundamental work on the MRI, much of which was accomplished without benefit of outside funding. Early MRI images included a potpourri of assorted small plants and animals, not unlike images produced early...