Sir Peter Mansfield FRS was born on October 9, 1933, and died on February 8, 2017. He was an English physicist who received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with Paul Lauterbur. They were honored for their discoveries related to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Mansfield worked as a professor at the University of Nottingham.

Early life

Mansfield was born on October 9, 1933, in Lambeth, London, to Sidney George (born in 1904, died in 1966) and Lillian Rose Mansfield (born in 1905, died in 1984; originally named Turner). Mansfield was the youngest of three sons.

He grew up in Camberwell. During World War II, he was evacuated from London. He first went to Sevenoaks and later twice to Torquay, Devon, where he stayed with the same family both times. After returning to London following the war, a school teacher told him to take the 11+ exam. He had never heard of the exam before and had no time to prepare. He did not pass the test to enter the local Grammar school. However, his score was high enough to allow him to attend a Central School in Peckham. At age 15, a careers teacher told him that science was not the right path for him. Soon after, he left school to work as a printer’s assistant.

At age 18, after developing an interest in rocketry, Mansfield began working in 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 began studying for A-levels at night school. Two years later, he was allowed to study physics at Queen Mary College, University of London.

Mansfield graduated with a BSc from Queen Mary in 1959. His final-year project, guided by Jack Powles, involved building a portable, transistor-based spectrometer to measure the Earth's magnetic field. Near the end of this project, Powles offered Mansfield a position in his NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) research group. Powles focused on studying how molecules move, especially in liquids. Mansfield's project was to create a pulsed NMR spectrometer to examine solid polymer systems. He earned his PhD in 1962; his thesis was titled Proton magnetic resonance relaxation in solids by transient methods.

Career

After completing his PhD, Mansfield was invited to do research work at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with Charlie Slichter. There, he studied nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in metals that had materials added to them.

In 1964, Mansfield returned to England to become a lecturer at Nottingham University. This allowed him to continue his research on NMR using multiple pulses. He was later promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1968 and Reader in 1970. During this time, his team created MRI equipment with support from the Medical Research Council. It was not until the 1970s, with the work of Paul Lauterbur and Mansfield, that NMR could be used to make images of the body. In 1979, Mansfield became a professor in the Department of Physics at Nottingham University, a position he held until his retirement in 1994.

• 1962: Research Associate, Department of Physics, University of Illinois
• 1964: Lecturer, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham
• 1968: Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham
• 1970: Reader, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham
• 1972–73: Senior Visitor, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg
• 1979: Professor, Department of Physics, University of Nottingham

Mansfield is credited with creating "slice selection" for MRI. This method allows a specific part of a person’s body to be imaged, instead of the whole body. He also helped scientists understand how MRI radio signals can be studied using math, making it possible to create useful images from these signals. He discovered how to make MRI scans faster by developing a technique called echo-planar imaging. This method allows certain types of images to be taken much more quickly than before. It also made functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) possible.

While working at Nottingham University, Mansfield tested the first full-body MRI prototype, which was set up just before Christmas in 1978. He volunteered to be the first person scanned in the machine, producing the first image of a living person. The prototype machine is now displayed in the Medical Section of the Science Museum.

Private life

Mansfield got married to Jean Margaret Kibble, who was born in 1935, on September 1, 1962. He had two daughters. Mansfield died in Nottingham on February 8, 2017, when he was 83 years old.