Stony Brook department declared a landmark

Forty years ago, during his second bite into a hamburger, Paul Lauterbur experienced a "Eureka" moment: He figured out the scientific basis of what was to become the MRI.

On Friday, the American Chemical Society honored Lauterbur posthumously by designating Stony Brook University's chemistry department a historic landmark.

It's the department where he taught for more than 20 years and refined his pioneering work on magnetic resonance imaging.

Stony Brook officials and Nancy Jackson, president of the chemical society, were on hand for the presentation of a plaque marking Lauterbur's accomplishment.

He was wooed away from the school in 1985 by the University of Illinois and won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2003 for his groundbreaking ideas that produced truly useful images. Lauterbur died four years later at the age of 78.

"He developed the mathematical theory for magnetic resonance imaging and how we can detect information from the human body," said Debiao Li, vice president of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

Lauterbur's widow, Joan Dawson, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois' Urbana-Champaign campus, said her husband's discovery came suddenly, while dining at a Long Island Big Boy restaurant with a colleague.

He jotted down his thoughts on a napkin but quickly ran out of space.

"Paul ran out to a drugstore and bought a spiral notebook, and wrote down his ideas," Dawson recalled.

In 2003, Lauterbur told Newsday on the day he won the Nobel Prize, "I knew [MRI] would be a useful tool from the very first ideas, but not how useful."

His development of MRI grew out of work involving nuclear resonance imaging.

MRI allows physicians to peer into the body without invasive surgery. It has proved useful for scanning the brain and other organs, as well as the spinal cord and joints. The images are comparable to those generated by three-dimensional CT scans but are produced without potentially harmful ionizing radiation.

MRI uses powerful magnets and radio waves to take pictures of the body. Dawson said she's touched that Lauterbur is still remembered at Stony Brook.

"My husband has been awarded many honors over the years," she said. "But this would be very special to him. And he would be proud to know this department still remembers him."