The Founder of the MRI Machine Died at Age 83: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Peter Mansfield – the inventor of MRI scanners – has died at the age of 83
The University of Nottingham’s head of the school of physics and astronomy, Professor Michael Merrifield, tweeted this afternoon: “I regret to announce the death of Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, esteemed colleague and Nobel Prize winner for his founding work on MRI.
Sir Peter’s career led to the creation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which provides highly detailed images of anatomy of both normal and diseased organs and structures, and likely to have saved many lives as a result. He was born in London in 1933, shortly before World War II.
His early education was somewhat disrupted, due to several war evacuations. When he returned he worked as a printer’s assistant, then obtained a position at the Ministry of Supply at the Rocket Propulsion Department in Buckinghamshire for around 18 months.
After this he was conscripted to serve in the army for two years. When he returned, he studied for A Levels at night school for roughly two years, and was accepted by Queen Mary College, University of London, to study Physics.
Sir Peter focused on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) after gaining his doctorate. He married his wife, Jean Margaret Kibble, in September 1962, and in 1964 he became a lecturer at University of Nottingham in the Department of Physics.
His work continued, which included applying NMR to imaging, leading to the development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Eventually the team could create an image on a human, the first one being of Sir Peter’s abdomen in 1978.
In 1993 he was knighted for his service to physics, and in 1995 he received the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Prize for MRI and the Gold Medal of the journal Clinical MRI.
Due to the huge impact of the MRI, applications of which are still developing today, Sir Peter was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2003. His contributions to science will mean he is never forgotten, particularly in the city of Nottingham: and even has a tram named after him.
The MRI machine is one of the very early non-destructive medical diagnosis machine which has utilized the best of the polymer technologies.
