Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The "Father of MRI" Dies

Physicist Paul C. Lauterbur, who received a 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine, died on Tuesday, March 27, 2006, in his home in Urbana, IL. He was 77.

Every time someone asks me if physics has any direct impact on our everyday lives (especially when they think that all we do are String theory, particle physics, etc), MRI/NMR is one of the first things I point to. There is a tremendous, and certainly not insignificant, amount of advancement in biology, biophysics, and medicine, that came out of physics, a fact that many people are still not aware of. I think those of us in this field need to continually sell this fact of physics to the general public.

Zz.

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