04/04/2007
Contrasting Achievements
Sometimes the products of the human mind can be awe inspiring while at other times they can be rather depressing. This time of year brings out the latter. Last Friday I filed my federal income tax forms electronically using TurboTax, thus enjoying the technological fruits of the silicon chip and the Internet. On the other hand, I did not enjoy the many hours spent gathering and inputting the data to comply with our Federal Tax Code. The day after filing my tax forms, after our customary morning mall walk, my wife and I got to see the Tax Code in person. A fellow mall walker works for the Internal Revenue Service and for some time had been promising that he would bring in the official Federal Tax Code. He did so on Saturday.
The paperbound code was, I would guess, about 2.5 to 3 inches thick and contained 9,490 pages! I don’t recall ever holding a book with almost 10 thousand very thin pages. But even more astounding was the print, which on many pages was so small as to be at the limit of my ability to decipher as letters of the alphabet! The term “fine print” has a new meaning for me. Our IRS friend pointed out that, while this was the actual tax code, there are 4 or 5 additional volumes of “regulations” the IRS uses to interpret the code! He also noted that Congress, not the IRS, writes the code. The IRS just enforces it. Nobody in the IRS could possibly know in detail more than a small fraction of the code. This explains incidents I’ve heard or read about where taxpayers have called the IRS and gotten incorrect answers to their questions. And, since lawyers wrote the code, it takes lawyers or highly trained CPAs to understand the code.
Some (I don’t know who) might consider our federal tax code an example of a monumental human “achievement”. After seeing it in person, I became an instant supporter of a “flat tax.” Last week also brought to mind an achievement of the awe inspiring type that was not the work of thousands of legislators laboring since 1913, when our federal income tax came into being. This achievement involved only a few very bright and dedicated scientists. One of them, Paul Lauterbur, died last week at the age of 77. Lauterbur played a key role in inventing and developing Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI. I’ve written in the past about a brief contact with Lauterbur and how MRI played an important role in my life.
In my column of 9/26/2000, I wrote about attending a celebration of the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Chemistry Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where I did my graduate work. At the celebratory dinner my research professor, Ed Wallace, got an alumni award for a distinguished scientific career and service to the school. At the dinner, I sat next to Paul Lauterbur, who was a complete nonentity to me. He was a very pleasant person and I enjoyed chatting with him. When he was introduced to receive his own alumni award, I was shocked to hear that he was being honored for his invention of MRI.
Three years later, in 2003, I was diagnosed with kidney cancer, with MRI providing the defining images that led to my surgery. Lauterbur, incidentally, died of some sort of kidney disease. Shortly after my surgery, the news came that Lauterbur had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on MRI (see column of 10/9/2003). In a following column (10/16/2003), I wrote about one Raymond Damadian, who made headlines when he took out newspaper ads complaining that he should have been included with the other two Nobelists for his own work on MRI.
As we’ve discussed before, MRI is based on nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR. A simplified explanation of NMR is that in a magnetic field certain nuclei, say of hydrogen, line up in the field. When a beam of radio waves hits these nuclei they are “knocked” out of alignment. As the nuclei return to align with the magnetic field, they give off weak radio waves and these waves are treated electronically to give images of the positions of the nuclei. It’s more complicated than this but this explanation is good enough for our purposes. The term “nuclear” was dropped from the name, not only because some (notably presidents) can’t pronounce it, but the term engenders fear in some quarters.
Lauterbur’s seminal contribution to MRI came while he was a professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. The idea came to him in a restaurant and he sketched his Nobel-winning idea on a napkin. Those working on NMR did their best to achieve highly uniform magnetic fields. Lauterbur’s idea was just the opposite. His idea was to deliberately introduce a non-uniform field that would allow the location of the weak radio signal to be determined precisely.
It took Lauterbur almost a decade to get the funds to complete his instrument and, in what he termed “not a spectacularly good decision”, the University decided it wasn’t worth the money to apply for a patent on his invention! The fellow who shared the Nobel Prize, Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham n England, did get a patent on his contributions. Sir Peter devised ways to obtain the now familiar 2-dimensional image slices of the body and he also figured out how to cut the time for imaging from hours to minutes. Anyone who has had an MRI, with its claustrophobic and noisy aspects, will thank Sir Peter for the latter! Mansfield became quite wealthy, thanks to his patent.
I first read of Lauterbur’s death in an obituary in the Star-Ledger. It seemed quite fitting that it appeared on the same day last week that the news broke that MRI scans should be run on certain women at high risk of developing or already having had breast cancer. One thing I found disappointing was that the fairly lengthy Star-Ledger obituary did not mention Pitt, nor did it refer to “Dr.” Lauterbur. Wondering if perhaps he never received his Ph.D. from Pitt, I checked his autobiography taken from the book “Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 2003” and posted on the Nobel Prize Web site.
After receiving his B.S. degree in 1951 from the Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, he went to work at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh. Lauterbur didn’t seem to be particularly fond of pursuing further academic studies but employees at Mellon could take courses at Pitt free of charge and he did take advantage of this opportunity. There were several Mellon employees taking courses when I was there in 1946-1950. It was in Pittsburgh that Lauterbur first was attracted to the field of NMR. However, he was drafted into the Army and ended up at the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland.
One of his tasks there was to weigh animals scheduled for use in chemical weapons testing. This sometimes involved him catching goats from an open field! His experience living on a farm in Ohio as a youth served him well in this endeavor. Fortunately, he learned of the acquisition of an NMR machine by the Army and, since he already knew about the field, ended up working with other draftee scientists and even turned out four papers on NMR while in the Army.
Finally, after the Army, Lauterbur returned to Mellon and received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Pitt in 1962. It was on to Stony Brook and the work on MRI that led to his Nobel Prize. We can all be thankful that he happened to work in Pittsburgh and happened to learn there about magnetic resonance. Pittsburgh isn’t just the home of the Steelers!
Allen F. Bortrum
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