by Annette
7. May 2007
The Economist published an obituary of the father of the MRI, Paul Lauterbur, who died this March. What makes the story of his life so inspiring is not just his glorious ability to invent, but the tenacity he had to evangelize his invention.
He submitted a paper to the scientific journal Nature in 1971 depicting images that showed the early basis of MRI technology. But it was rejected. That same year, he became the president of a company that attempted to market MRI machines that struggled and nearly failed. Undaunted, he shopped his invention around the world and at the end of his life 22,000 MRI machines were peering into the atomic spacial structure of the human body.
In my model of invention, The Fool perseveres because of the driving conviction that they have something valuable to share. You can imagine both the angst and the sheer force of character that propeled Lauterbur to pick himself up off after failure and keep trying. He had the best interest of the humanity to push him. And BTW - he won a joint share of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2003.
