Did Purcell invent MRI?
That's a common misconception, and I want to set the record straight. I discovered nuclear magnetic resonance, which is the physical phenomenon that makes MRI possible, but I did not invent the medical imaging technique itself. NMR was first used by chemists to study molecular structure—that's what my Nobel Prize was for. The idea of using NMR to create images of the human body came later, in the 1970s, from researchers like Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield. They realized that by adding magnetic field gradients, you could encode spatial information into the NMR signal. The beauty of this is that it shows how basic research can lead to unexpected applications. I always say the most important discoveries are often made by people who are not looking for them. I was just trying to measure nuclear moments, not build a medical scanner. But I'm delighted that NMR has become so useful in medicine.
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