The Road to Pittsburgh and Beyond

Address of Paul C. Lauterbur at the 2004 Commencement
of the University of Pittsburgh, April 25, 2004

Chancellor Nordenberg, distinguished faculty, staff, parents, and, last but not least, students, whom this whole thing is about. I’m going to tell you a little story today that is really not so much specifically about what I have done, but it may in a very general way predict the kinds of things that you people may do in your lives to come. By the way, listen carefully, this may be on the final. As had been mentioned, I’ll skip the very early days of this work which actually started, surprisingly, about the time I was in junior high school, where I got interested—and this will be important later—in many different things, one of them the chemistry of silicone, and I did experiments in my home laboratory at that time. Then I went off to college; my career in high school was a bit spotty when it came to grades, but good enough to get me into college finally. I went to what was then Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland. I went through the usual four years there doing the usual things, several of which I was supposed to do, several of which I was supposed to do but didn’t, others of which I was not supposed to be doing but did. The usual kind of collegiate career.

At the end of that time, as some of you will recognize, it came time to make a decision about what to do next after this ceremony—the equivalent of this ceremony—so I was doing job interviews. I had had enough of professors and lectures and things like that, so I was interviewing for industrial jobs where I would have the chance to really do things in the laboratory. I interviewed with the representatives from one company who were interested in my possible qualifications for what I might be able to do in particular, to be sure of someone who’s just a college graduate and has not yet done anything real. They were willing to take a chance, but they thought that rather than going to their company laboratories, I might appreciate more a program that they supported at Mellon Institute, which was basic research essentially of interest to the company, but in a rather academic environment. They also said, which did not make a great deal of sense to me at that time, that if I wanted to, there was also the opportunity to take the occasional graduate course at Pitt.

At that time, for those of you who are not up on your ancient history, Mellon Institute was a unit of the University of Pittsburgh, and having a job there of any sort meant that you had essentially faculty privileges at the University of Pittsburgh and also the privileges of a student. You could be both at one time. Take courses, use the faculty club, buy faculty tickets to the football games if you wanted. In general, there were fringe benefits. So I went down from Cleveland to Pittsburgh.

Initially, I was living in a boarding house up on North Dithridge Street but spending most of my time, of course, at Mellon Institute, getting involved with the work. And then, somehow or other, I decided I had had a bit of relaxation from the intensity of four years of Bachelor of Science work, so I did take graduate courses at the University of Pittsburgh, and two things happened along the way—one at Mellon Institute and one that would be relevant later, pretty early on at Pitt. One was of a seminar given at Mellon Institute by someone who was describing the work that they were doing with this technique called nuclear magnetic resonance. It sounded interesting. I was interested in electronic structures of molecules, and there was a new way to look at that kind of molecular property, appropriate for a chemist. All of my degrees were in chemistry at that time, as they have always been. So I got interested and proposed to this gentleman that we would set up a collaboration. He was a professor, and I was a mere college graduate, but, at any rate, I could supply him with some of the compounds that would be interesting; he had the machinery and the techniques that could be interesting, so we set up a plan for collaboration. I also, as I said, took some work at the University. And in the course of that, I gave a couple of graduate seminars, and one of them was on some nuclear magnetic resonance studies of the properties of rubber. That was my first academic experience with the subject, just theoretical, reviewing a paper, but it did give me at least some credential as having some familiarity with the topic—that will be important later.

I continued working there at the Mellon Institute and doing a bit of work with Pitt when my draft board decided that that was enough. “You have been deferred for long enough. If we aren’t careful, you’re going to get out of your military service,” so they drafted me into the Army. There, of course, I was eventually assigned to a unit of people who would not make good infantrymen—marginal types who were not really military types, but those who were almost illiterate, those who were not terribly healthy, those who had Ph.D.s, other people who were regarded as unsuitable military material—not likely to soldier away in the proper manner. I barely had enough experience and teaching under my belt to be assigned to such a group.

I went off to a place called the Army Chemical Center in Edgewood, Maryland, and was assigned providentially to the medical laboratories of that institution, where I learned things that I had not learned in college, like how to catch a goat in an open field when it’s needed for a medical experiment. None of you probably ever chased a frightened goat, which doesn’t want to be caught, but it adds to your experience, along with a number of things of that sort. More importantly, during chit-chat in the barracks at one time, I learned from a fellow soldier that there was a machine being bought by another branch of the laboratories there called an NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance] machine, but he couldn’t even pronounce the name of it. And so I said, “I know about that.” Of course I did. I’d given a seminar at Pitt and heard a seminar at Mellon Institute. So I was the person on that Army base to know more about the subject than anyone else. This got me a transfer into that laboratory that was about to be set up. I helped get it set up. There was, in the Army at the same time, a buddy of mine from high school whom I got transferred also into that laboratory. There were also a number of other marginal types, like Harvard Ph.D.s, but, as I said, I was officially certified as knowing something about the subject, which I hastily studied up on to learn enough more to be of use. One thing led to another; I spent maybe a year at that sort of operation and out of it got, eventually, four scientific papers, which is more than you usually get of service in the Army.

So then I had to decide what to do with myself after I was released from my military service. There were several options, one of which, if I could talk people into it, was returning to Mellon Institute and to the University of Pittsburgh. And surprisingly enough—this is a story in and of itself that I will not bore you with—I was able to persuade the group that I worked with to buy one of these machines and put me in charge of it again. For no obvious reason they were willing to do this, but that gave me the chance to have my own such machine and to work in my own laboratory at Mellon Institute. At the same time, while continuing to take courses at Pitt, I was in the chemistry department; for special reasons I got an advisor for my Ph.D. work from the physics department, which seemed like good news at the time—but there was bad news yet to come. After a little while, he decided—I don’t think it was my fault—he decided he was deadly bored and wanted to move on to another area of physics, so he left the University of Pittsburgh and went to work elsewhere. The then-head of the chemistry department at Pitt said, “Don’t worry, just keep on doing the work you’re doing at Mellon Institute, and if anything needs to be signed, I’ll sign it. You don’t need an advisor.” So there I was, cast on my own.

I continued to work quite hard and quite diligently on that subject and got a lot of interesting publications and experience. But I rather neglected—except for continuing to climb up the hill to the chemistry department and take many, many courses— I rather neglected my graduate work at Pitt until, eventually, a couple of things happened, one of which was that I gave a seminar at another university, which I thought was just an ordinary seminar. I found out later from a friend at that institution that it was really meant to be a job interview, and they planned to offer me a faculty position but were horrified to find that I did not yet have a Ph.D. That was a wake-up call. I should get more serious about my work at Pitt. I managed to put together a thesis and to defend it and eventually, after all of this, managed to get my degree from Pitt. And then, when that time came, again I had to decide what to do with my professional career from then on.

There were a number of job opportunities—these were fairly good times, as compared to many, at the beginning of the end of the 60s. There were possible government jobs, industry jobs, academic jobs. The man who saw to it that I was offered a good job in industry was shocked and surprised when I decided instead to try a job in a new university that had just recently been set up. And why in the world would I possibly go off to some unknown university instead of taking the wonderful industrial job that was being offered to me? What I replied to him was that the attraction of academia was that as a professor I would be in a situation where I could do any silly thing that came to mind, no matter what it was, and that more than made up for everything else. So off I went to do my silly things.

I went to the State University of New York at Stony Brook—at that time it was just opening its permanent campus—and I had the interesting opportunity of being a part of the development of a very new institution, of helping to set its traditions, and getting involved with its affairs in various ways, which was more educational than going to a long-established place. At any rate, I began my work there, doing some related but different things than what I had done at Mellon Institute.

And then came another right-angle turn. In May of one year, when I happened to be without duties for the summer, there was a small company that I had become associated with as a consultant, as a board member. A board meeting was hastily called in May because some of the other people involved and the company’s banker had found out that it was in very terrible financial condition. At that meeting, there were two decisions that could be made—one was to close it down that very moment and declare it bankrupt and dissolved; the other was to find someone willing to try to save it. And people turned and looked at me. There I was at the end of the academic year, obviously had nothing better to do with myself, so I got more or less drafted by my colleagues to try to save this company, because I had no real experience of that kind. I commuted to New Kensington, Pennsylvania. That’s about as close as I came to returning to Pittsburgh. In the course of trying to solve this problem, it got worse and worse and worse: Everything I discovered turned out to be worse than anyone would have predicted. But, fortunately, one good thing kept going. And we’re getting to the nugget in the middle of all of this.

There was a group of scientists from another university who came by to do some experiments using the company’s equipment— it was nuclear magnetic resonance equipment, which was where I claimed my expertise. And I watched these experiments going on, and I was able to observe that the results that they were getting studying tissues from experimental rats—malignant tumors, ordinary tissues from all the various organs of the animal—did give some interesting results. They were cutting out little pieces from an animal that had been sacrificed to the experiment and putting inside this machine in a little glass tube, a couple tenths of an inch in diameter, and doing the measurements. The measurements seemed more reliable than many people had made on these things. And the results showed a great deal of distinction between different organs, tissues within the animal. And some people were speculating that maybe that could be medically useful. Well, maybe there was, post-mortem, but I couldn’t much imagine that there was much interest in human beings in having their conditions diagnosed after they were gone or after they had had an operation.

If there could only be a way to find out these properties of organs and tissues in a noninvasive fashion without cutting up people or animals.

I’ll invoke another local institution here. A friend of mine from that company and I went out to dinner that night at a Big Boy restaurant—we were living high off the hog in those days—and chatted about what the possibilities might be. Something occurred to me, that there was a principal way to do this. I ran out to a drug store that was open late in New Kensington, picked up a research notebook, or at least something that would do for a research notebook, and that evening wrote down a couple of pages on these ideas and had a witness the next day—all the things you were supposed to do. And then over the next few days, I began thinking of more and better possibilities, better ways of doing these experiments, and the follow-up is important always on any ideas you might have.

Then I thought that what I didn’t know was whether the kind of radio signals that one could get from tissues from inside a person or an animal could possibly be turned into a picture, where you could say that this signal comes from here, this from here, this from here—this side you have, that side, your arm, leg, stomach, whatever. So I got to work thinking about that and using something I’d learned in a graduate course at Pitt—I thought of a variation of mathematics that might make it possible. While sitting—by that time I was back at my home university, the fall semester had started, but I did have a little bit of time while sitting during dull seminars; you’ve all heard those, they may occur in some places, where the speaker would think I was taking notes, but I was really doing calculations on completely different things—I found a way of making pictures from these signals. [At least] I thought so, and it seemed to work out.

I then asked myself, “Could you ever get a big enough signal from something as large as a human being, for example?” That was not obvious, because the small fraction of an inch was the usual size of the specimens that people were using. But could you do it from something two, three feet in diameter? And so I did some calculations that were standard textbook and figured that that was indeed possible—barely, but it was possible. I know some other people at the time—I heard about this later—who had not done such calculations, but when they heard about this work, they said they knew there was not enough signal, they didn’t even have to do the calculations. You never want to know too much, and in particular [you want to] be a little bit skeptical of what you think you know, not just what other people know.

And I had to ask myself, “Could anybody build magnets big enough to put people in?” This was a very new sort of thing. But I was able to find in scientific literature some reference to designs for such magnets that would have the properties necessary to do these experiments, and so I filled in everything. There was some mathematics that could be used to make the pictures, there was going to be enough signal to do the studies, you build a big enough apparatus to actually put people in, and so that seemed like a useful thing to try to do. After that, I did some experiments myself on small equipment, and after a number of months, I managed to get some help from some undergraduate students in our department who were to do some of the work, much later some graduate students and postdocs, and eventually other people around the world, other universities, and industry began to pick up on the ideas, and so gradually the field developed. And it’s only because so many other people picked up on these things and decided to work with them that I am here today, because, of course, no one gets such improbable honors just for having an idea—it has to work, it has to have some effects in the world. And I’m sure you all realize that, but that’s certainly one of the take-home lessons of this story.

Another take-home lesson from this story is that no matter what happens, your experiences and education and even getting drafted into the Army can all be of assistance to a developing career, even though you never think so at the time. But if you keep after what you’re after and make appropriate choices from time to time, and they turn out to be things that other people will eventually, though not originally, agree to, and if you have a new idea, you do have to live through a period when you are called an idiot by the most qualified people you can imagine, like Nobel laureates…. But you have to persevere to go on to do what you’re going to be doing. And the take-home lesson, and there always is one for a commencement speech, is do whatever really excites you in your life and do it as best you can, and if you have enough luck, it will work out. I don’t know anything better to tell my own students or the people here. Even when the sound system fails, you just keep on going. So I’m going to end my speech at this time and let you get on with the things you’re really here for.