Paul C. Lauterbur life and biography

Paul Christian Lauterbur was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible.

Dr. Lauterbur was a professor along with his wife Joan at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 22 years until his death in Urbana. He never stopped working with undergraduates on research, and he served as a professor of chemistry, with appointments in bioengineering, biophysics and computational biology at the Center for Advanced Study.

The scientific principles behind magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were developed in the 1950s, and until the 1970s the technology was primarily used for studying the chemical structure of substances. In 1973, American chemist Paul C. Lauterbur wrote an article published in the journal Nature, suggesting that a second, weaker magnetic field, the gradient field, could be incorporated into nuclear resonance imaging, allowing two-dimensional internal images of the body. Lauterbur was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 2003, sharing the honors with Sir Peter Mansfield.

The Nobel honors for Lauterbur and Mansfield have been considered controversial, for their exclusion of Herman Y. Carr and Raymond Damadian, two other scientists whose early work on MRI had almost certainly been read (but not cited) by the two laureates.

Awards and honors:


Dow Corning Mellon Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lasker Award 1984
National Medal of Science 1987
IEEE Medal of Honor 1987
Kyoto Prize 1994
Nobel Prize for Medicine 2003, with Peter Mansfield
National Inventors Hall of Fame 2007
American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Physical Society
International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
National Academy of Sciences
Alpha Chi Sigma Chemistry Fraternity
Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society
Luxembourg Ancestry Paternal
German Ancestry Maternal

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