Richard Ernst, father of IRM and Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1991, died

Richard Ernst is dead. The Swiss died on Friday in Winterthur, in the canton of Zürich, the city where he was born on August 14, 1933. He was 87 years old. The former professor at the prestigious ETH Zurich had been living since the beginning of last year in a retirement home in his hometown. He leaves a wife and three children, specifies the Swiss news agency ATS. Richard Ernst is considered the father of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the Swiss professor for “important developments in methodology in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy”, which gave rise to the MRI, now essential for modern medicine.

The day of the announcement of his award, Professor Ernst, during an impromptu press briefing in New York where he had just arrived from Moscow, explained that “with this technique, you can investigate almost everything: you can examine the human body, […] physiological processes, use it for many medical applications. And on the other hand, you can analyze a molecule, its appearance, its dynamics, how the different molecules move, how they react to each other ”.

Richard Ernst struggled to accept his Nobel Prize

Modest, he had said that having had the price alone was a problem for him, “because I am really not the only one to have made my contribution in (the) sector” of nuclear magnetic resonance.

NMR is a spectroscopy technique applied to certain atomic nuclei (in particular that of hydrogen, the proton, present in large numbers in living organisms) which have the property of behaving like small magnets. When these particles are found in a magnetic field having a determined frequency, called the resonant frequency, they manifest themselves by electromagnetic effects that can be measured.

NMR was first demonstrated in 1945 by the Swiss Felix Bloch and the American Edward Mills Purcell, both working in the United States. This discovery won them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1952. However, at first, a fundamental difficulty was the relatively low sensitivity of this method.

In 1966, Richard Ernst, in collaboration with the American Weston Anderson, succeeded in increasing the sensitivity of the method by exposing the sample to short and intense pulses of radio frequencies. It was not until the early 1970s, in particular the development of superconducting magnets capable of producing sufficiently powerful magnetic fields, to make NMR an instrument for the detailed study of molecular structures in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology. The first NMR image for medical purposes was presented in 1973.