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Who amongst the following facilitated the development of MRI as an important diagnostic tool and for that won a Nobel Prize?
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- Sydney Brenner
- Paul C. Lauterbur
- John E. Sulton
- H. Robert Horvitz
- Sydney Brenner
Correct Option: B
Paul Christian Lauterbur (May 6, 1929 – March 27, 2007) was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) possible. Lauterbur credits the idea of the MRI to a brainstorm one day at a suburban Pittsburgh Big Boy, with the MRI’s first model scribbled on a table napkin. The further research that led to the Nobel Prize was performed at Stony Brook University in the 1970s. Lauterbur is credited for the idea of introducing gradients in the magnetic field which allows for determining the origin of the radio waves emitted from the nuclei of the object of study. This spatial information allows two-dimensional pictures to be produced.