Sir Peter
Mansfield FRS, (9 October
1933 – 8 February 2017) was an English physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine, shared with Paul Lauterbur, for discoveries concerning Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI). Mansfield was a professor
at the University
of Nottingham.
Early Life
Mansfield was born in Lambeth, London on 9 October 1933, to Sidney George (a
gas fitter) and Rose Lillian Mansfield. Mansfield
is the youngest of three brothers.
Mansfield grew up in Camberwell. During World War II he was evacuated from London, initially to Sevenoaks and then twice to Torquay, Devon, where he was able to stay with the same family on
both occasions. On returning to London
after the war he was told by a school master to take the 11+ exam. Having never
heard of the exam before, and having no time to prepare, Mansfield failed to gain a place at the local
Grammar school. His mark was, however, high enough for him to go to a Central School in Peckham. At the age of 15 he
was told by a careers teacher that science wasn't for him. He left school
shortly afterwards to work as a printer's assistant.
At the age of 18, having
developed an interest in rocketry, Mansfield
took up a job with the Rocket Propulsion Department of the Ministry of Supply
in Westcott, Buckinghamshire. Eighteen months later he was called up for
National Service.
Education
After serving in the army for two
years, Mansfield
returned to Westcott and started studying for A-levels at night school. Two
years later he gained entrance to study physics at Queen
Mary College,
London.
Mansfield graduated with a BSc from Queen Mary's in 1959. His final-year project,
supervised by Dr. Jack Powles, was to construct a portable, transistor-based
spectrometer to measure the Earth's magnetic field. Towards the end of this
project Powles offered Mansfield
a position in his NMR research group. Powles' interest was in studying
molecular motion, mainly liquids. Mansfield's
project was to build a pulsed NMR spectrometer to study solid polymer systems.
He received his PhD in 1962; his thesis was titled Proton magnetic resonance
relaxation in solids by transient methods.
Career
Following his PhD, Mansfield was invited to postdoctoral research with Charlie
Slichter at the University
of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign, where he carried out an NMR study of doped metals.
In 1964 he returned to England to take up a place as a Lecturer at Nottingham University where he could continue his
studies in multiple-pulse NMR. He was successively appointed Senior Lecturer in
1968 and Reader in 1970. During this period his team developed the MRI
equipment with the help of grants from the Medical Research Council. It was not
until the 1970s with Paul Lauterbur's and Mansfield's developments that NMR
could be used to produce images of the body. In 1990 Mansfield was appointed Professor of the
Department of Physics until his retirement in 1994.
Mansfield is credited with showing how the radio signals from MRI can be
mathematically analysed, making interpretation of the signals into a useful
image a possibility. He is also credited with discovering how fast imaging
could be possible by developing the MRI protocol called echo-planar imaging.
Echo-planar imaging allows T2* weighted images to be collected many times
faster than previously possible. It also has made functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) feasible.
Awards and Honors
- 1983 Gold Medal of the Society of Magnetic
Resonance in Medicine
- 1984 Joint award of the Royal Society Welcome
Foundation Gold Medal and Prize.
- 1986 Elected Fellow of Queen Mary
College (now Queen
Mary University of London)
- 1987 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society
(FRS)
- 1987 Elected President of the Society of
Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
- 1988 Awarded Duddell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics
- 1988 Awarded Silvanus Thompson Medal by the
British Institute of Radiology
- 1989 Antoine Béclère Medal from the
International Society of Radiology and the Antoine Béclère Institute in Paris
- 1990 Royal Society Mullard Award (joint with
John Mallard & Jim Hutchinson)
- 1992 International Society of Magnetic
Resonance (ISMAR) prize (joint with P. Lauterbur)
- 1993 Knighted
- 1993 Silver Plaque of the European Society of
Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and Biology
- 1993 Elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Radiology and Honorary Member of
the British Institute of Radiology
- 1994 Elected Honorary Member of the Society
of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Fellow of the Society of Magnetic
Resonance
- 1995 Garmisch-Partenkirchen
Prize for MRI
- 1995 Gold Medal of the European Congress of
Radiology and the European Association of Radiology
- 1997 Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics
- 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
for Medicine with Paul Lauterbur
- 2009 was presented with the Lifetime
Achievement Award by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, ceremony broadcast on
ITV's Pride of Britain Awards
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