Magnetic resonance

Interview with Kyle Myers, Director of the Division of Imaging, Diagnostics, and Software Reliability in the FDA Center for Devices in Radiological Health. Myers recounts her childhood and the many moves her family made in support of her father's career in engineering management for General Electric, and she describes her father's formative influence and encouragement for her to pursue a career in science. She describes her college course work in physics at Occidental and Caltech, and she describes her decision to pursue a degree in optical sciences at the University of Arizona. She describes her work at the Jet Propulsion Lab and how this experience focused her interest on optics. Myers discusses working with her graduate advisor Harry Barrett on human perception and radiological imaging, and the importance of the research support she received from Kodak. She describes her postdoctoral work at Corning developing long-distance optical fibers, and she explains the circumstances leading to her career focus in medical imaging research at the FDA. Myers discusses the administrative evolution of the relevant offices and research centers at the FDA over the course of her career, and she discusses some of the major technological advances and her role in their development, including CT imaging, MRIs, and mammography screening. She describes some of the partnerships in the trade industry and across the federal interagency process that serve as important partners in her work, and she explains the adjudication process when a company is at odds with an FDA review of a given device. At the end of the interview Myers conveys her interest in the future prospects of digital pathology and the benefits it promises in disease detection and treatment.

This is an interview with Peter Basser, Principal Investigator at NIH and Section Chief of the Laboratory on Quantitative Imaging and Tissue Sciences with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Basser recounts his childhood in Long Island as the child of Austrian-Jewish immigrants. He describes his undergraduate education at Harvard and how he became interested in biology from a physics perspective. He describes his decision to stay on for graduate research where he worked on fluid dynamics in the lab of Tom McMahon. Basser discusses his postgraduate work on medical devices at Hewlett-Packard, and he describes the opportunities that led to his work at the NIH. He describes the research over the course of his tenure in magnetic stimulation and the flow of currents through nerve membranes. Basser discusses his move to NICHHD and the new opportunities becoming a Principal Investigator offered. He explains his long-range work on tensor imaging and anisotropic diffusion in brain tissue and the growing capacity to image tissue in stroke patients. Basser discusses his work in biomimetics and he explains his dual motivations in furthering both basic science and translational research that has clinical value. He explains the unique collaborative opportunities the NIH affords to work with medical doctors. At the end of the interview, Basser emphasizes the importance of continuum mechanics as a scientific concept that informs all aspects of his work, and he explains why he is excited in the future about new opportunities to study subcellular objects with NMR and other techniques.  

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Raymond Orbach, professor of physics emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. Orbach recounts his childhood in Los Angeles, his early interests in chemistry, and his undergraduate experience at Caltech. He discusses his graduate work at Berkeley on integral equations and his research at Bell Labs and at Oxford where he worked on resonance relaxation. Orbach explains his research agenda at UCLA, including his work on magnetic resonance and the antiferromagnetic ground state. He discusses his work as chancellor of UC Riverside and his ability to keep up research while working in administration. Orbach recounts the circumstances leading to him becoming director of science at DOE and his “dual-hatted” work as Undersecretary of Science for DOE. He provides an overview of the state of high energy physics in the early 2000s and the long-term affect of the SSC cancellation. In the final part of the interview, Orbach talks about his research on energy issues at superconducting quantum interference devices at UT. 

Dr. Han Wen runs the Imaging Physics Laboratory at the National Institute of Health. In this interview, Wen discusses his childhood in Beijing and the circumstances that led to his decision to pursue graduate studies in statistical quantum mechanics at the University of Maryland and its joint biophysics program that the Department of Physics ran with the NIH. Wen describes his early interest in MRI first as a graduate student at the NIH and then as a full time physicist. Wen provides an overview of his contribution to improvements in MRI technology and explains how the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration at the NIH has enhanced his research. Wen explains his current work on x-ray CT imaging, which he hopes will improve in the future to the point when radiation exposure is minimized and the imaging quality becomes so good that many biopsies will no longer be necessary.

Developments of the technique of separated oscillating fields and the atomic clock. Move to Harvard University from Columbia University and Brookhaven National Laboratory; work at Harvard concentrating on the first molecular beam magnetic resonance apparatus, doctoral thesis of Harwood Kolsky; Jerrold Zacharias and the cesium beam clock; Brookhaven Molecular Beam Conferences (beginning 1947), significant developments in resonance. Also prominently mentioned are: P. I. Dee, Harwood Kolsky, Polykarp Kusch, William Aaron Nierenberg, Pendulchron, Ken Smith, John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, Robert F. Vessot, Earl Wilkie; Brookhaven National Laboratory Molecular Beam Conferences, Fort Monmouth, Frequency Control Symposium, National Science Foundation (U.S.), United States Army Signal Corps, United States National Bureau of Standards, United States Office of Naval Research, and University of California at Berkeley.

Anderson discusses his interest in Complexity and Physics of Information; the Santa Fe Institute; his doubts about DCS theory of superconductivity and theory of A15s; resonation valence bond ideas; political involvement from local issues to Star Wars defense. Other topics include: ferromagnetism; Ginzburg-Landau theory; Josephson effect; magnetism; military research in the United States; solid state physics; solid state physics in Japan; spin glasses; superconductivity; and spin lattice relaxation.

Covers the gradual move from Bell Labs to Princeton, at first part time then full; discusses work on spin glass problem and ramifications for optimization theory and neural networks; reaction to Nobel Prize; return to localization and Gang of Four paper; thoughts on mixed valance problem and heavy electron systems.

Anderson discusses the theory of superfluid Helium-3; recalls germination of the idea and eventual publication of "More is Different"; reviews work on topological defects; discusses motivation for resonation valence bond work with Fazekas; talks about interaction with Lee and Rice on charge density waves; recalls foray into astrophysics with Pines and Alpar and theory of pulsars glitches.

Interview focuses briefly on personal details of Philip Anderson's life and almost exclusively on technical aspects of Anderson's research. After discussing his undergraduate and graduate education at Harvard including his research on spectral lines, he begins the technical aspects of the interview by reviewing his interest in anti-ferromagnetism and his time in Japan. Included in this are his thoughts on the organization of the Japanese scientific community. The second half of the interview deals entirely with his interest in superconductivity and localized moments. Within this general topic there is some treatment of his thoughts on the time that he spent in Cambridge, MA.