Oration: Sir Peter Mansfield
Sir Peter Mansfield is a native of Camberwell, where his father was a
gas fitter. His education was a piecemeal affair, because he was
evacuated to Torquay to escape the air raids. He returned for about a year
and was in Camberwell when the first doodlebug passed overhead and
landed in New Cross; later in 1944, when the first V2 landed in Chiswick,
he was again evacuated to Devon. One of the consequences of this
dislocation was failure in the 11–plus, so young Peter attended a ‘central
school’, which under the 1944 Education Act soon became a secondary
modern school. His careers teacher told him that he had no gift for
science. He left school at age 15 and secured work as a printer's assistant.
This might not seem the most promising start for a career in physics, but
it must have given him a measure of adeptness with his hands that was to
stand him in good stead when he began to build spectometers. He
developed an interest in rocketry and moved to the Rocket Propulsion
Department of the Ministry of Supply before doing his National Service.
The interest in things that whiz through the air has never quite left Sir
Peter: the trajectory that began with V1s, V2s and rockets led to an
interest in flying, and he now holds a private pilot’s licence for both
aeroplanes and helicopters.
Sir Peter took A-levels at night school, eventually going up to Queen Mary
College as what would now be called a mature student. He stayed on to
do a PhD, and built a pulsed NMR spectrometer to study solid polymer
systems; this led to his discovery of what were later called 'solid echoes'.
He then took a post-doc at University of Illinois, where he began by
building another spectrometer, before taking up a lectureship at University
of Nottingham, which was to be his base for the rest of his career. On
arriving in Nottingham he was given a young Canadian research student,
and so for the first time was able to delegate; the research student built
the next spectrometer.
Academic life was less fraught in those days, and Peter’s department had
a tea room where colleagues could have that which is known in the
language of physics as SRT: Spin Relaxation Time. It was over one such
cup of tea that MRI was conceived. Gradually this new imaging technique
developed, and a prototype was built. It had to be tested on a live
subject. A California scientist had written to warn that the gradient levels
being proposed were potentially dangerous for anyone inserted into this
machine. Sir Peter redid the calculations, decided that his friend in
California was wrong, and volunteered to climb into the machine himself
in an attempt to secure an image of his abdomen. There was no time to
install a light, so Peter was clamped into the magnet vertically and in pitch
darkness until the procedure was completed 50 minutes later. The
scanner was born.
This scanner baby needed one important refinement before it could be
seriously useful for diagnostic purposes. The original technology collected
images line by line, but results were compromised because bodies, unless
they are obligingly dead, are constantly in motion: babies are kicking,
stomachs are churning and brains are waving. Sir Peter invented a new
technology and a new acronym: EPI, which is echo planar imaging. EPI
allowed him to use MRI for ‘dynamic imaging’, which meant that the
technology could be used to study processes in the body. One element in
this technology, was supplied by our Chancellor’s company.
The honours that followed read like a list achieved by a university rather
than an individual: gold medals from learned societies, the fellowship of
the Royal Society, honorary doctorates from Kent, Strasbourg and Kraków
and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Medicine and a knighthood. These
honours, welcome as they are by the medical community, are not the
deepest font of satisfaction for Sir Peter. The real prize is the knowledge
that because his science has greatly enhanced the ability of doctors to
diagnose accurately, the anguish suffered by patients with serious
illnesses can in some measure be mitigated by the knowledge of exactly
what is wrong, and problems can be addressed through drugs or surgery,
so offering the hope of a living future beyond the illness.
Mr Chancellor, on the recommendation of the Senate and the Council, I
present to you Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, that you may confer upon
him the honorary degree of Doctor of Science.
G Campbell, Public Orator