Physicists Honored for Their Medical Insights

摘要

Discoveries that give doctors and researchers unprecedented views of the body's internal workings have earned this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham, U.K. The two physicists were recognized for their contributions to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The award also touched off an unusual public protest from an MRI researcher who was not cited. MRI pioneers met with some skepticism 3 decades ago when they first suggested that the technique, which had previously been applied only to chemicals in solution, could produce useful images of something as complex as the human body. But MRI is now a standard tool for diagnosing everything from damaged joint cartilage to cancerous tumors and brain damage following a stroke. In recent years, a refinement―functional MRI (fMRI)―has enabled researchers to image blood flow, allowing insights into the workings of a living brain that were unthinkable when the prizewinners made their discoveries.