• Question: Who invented the mri scanner?

    Asked by Aisha to Rebecca on 23 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Rebecca Dewey

      Rebecca Dewey answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      A man called Paul Lauterbur invented the MRI scanner. He was born in 1929 and was working at the University of Pittsburgh when he invented it in the 1950s (he was a student at the time!). He did more research over the 1960s and 1970s, and the first paper on MRI was published in Nature in 1973.

      Since then, Peter Mansfield, at the University of Nottingham, developed the idea even further, inventing a method that is now used to take an image of a slice through the body very quickly, without causing any harm to the person. I used to work in the same department as Peter Mansfield – and I’ve met him a few times (he was my boyfriend’s PhD supervisor!).

      Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield were awarded the Nobel Prize for their invention in 2003.

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