On 6 October, Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield, the pioneers of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), became the latest scientists to be honoured with a Nobel Prize in Medicine. The Nobel committee credited Lauterbur with discovering the possibility of creating a two-dimensional image by introducing variations into magnetic fields, and Mansfield with developing the mathematical analysis of the signals and the technique of echo-planar imaging, which led to the implementation of MRI as a useful clinical tool. According to The Globe and Mail (7 October 2003), Mansfield himself acted as a human guinea pig when the time came to test his methods on a live subject.

Although MRI is a boon to many branches of medicine, it has particular implications for neurology and neuroscience. As The Times (UK) points out (7 October, 2003), “MRI is especially useful for examining the brain and spinal cord. Nearly all brain disorders produce differences in water content, which show up on the MRI scan.”

Of course, for many neuroscientists the ultimate development of MRI is functional MRI, which allows the indirect visualization of changes in neural activity in the human brain. Talking to The Times, Lauterbur said, “There is one very interesting area in the observation of processes going on in the brain, to determine parts of the brain that respond to various thoughts and perceptions.” The techniques involved in these studies are still being improved, but the fundamentals go back to the seminal work of Mansfield, Lauterbur and others in the 1970s.