Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in developing the MRI scanner.
On the island
Eight records
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity (from The Planets)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Richard Cooke
I was in those early days quite interested in space travel and so on, and I suppose it did have some effect when I first heard this. I found it very moving and uplifting.
this piece I heard for the first time when I was fifteen, had left school and went to live in France for one month. And this particular piece of music figured very much in my mind at the time and I've enjoyed it ever since.
London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult
I heard this many, many years ago, and I found it to be a very stirring and inspiring piece.
Vom Barette schwankt die Feder
this reminds me very much of my sabbatical year spent in Heidelberg.
Vltava (The Moldau) (from Má vlast)Favourite
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Järvi
When I was living in Germany, we made a trip ... by car from Heidelberg to Poland and we passed through Czechoslovakia and we went over this gorge and the sign said the Voltava and we stopped in Prague. And I found a shop there and bought the piece of music.
It reminds me very much of the occasion in 1993 when I received a knighthood at Buckingham Palace. This piece of music was being played as background music and I enjoyed it very much.
this was around at about the time that my wife and I got married, and this piece of music was given to me on a postcard. By my wife.
Nimrod (from Enigma Variations)
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle
it's an enigmatic piece of music as far as I'm concerned, and I love it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:22What do you remember about [climbing into the prototype of your MRI scanner]?
Initially, yes. The very first experiments were done with me climbing in the magnet and producing a, by today's standards, very crude scan of my abdomen.
Presenter asks
2:27Was it in your mind [that the machine could give you a heart attack]?
Well, it was, but I I was fairly sure that it wouldn't cause any problem. But on the other hand, the machine that we had created at that time was completely enclosed in an aluminium box for magnetic and electromagnetic screening. And as a result of this, I was in complete darkness, pitch black inside. So it was a combination of being you know tightly enclosed. It got very warm in in there because the magnet wasn't cooled properly.
Presenter asks
3:36How did you feel when you eventually saw those [first MRI] pictures?
They were not particularly good or clear by today's standards, but at the time they were the only picture, so I was able to show that you could get an image of a live person. And that was the best that we could do at the time.
The keepsakes
The book
A photograph album of pictures of the family
be a constant reminder of some of the memorable occasions that we've had.
Presenter asks
6:27Why did you want to be a scientist?
Well, I was very impressed towards the end of the war with the way things were going with so-called doodlebugs, V one weapons. I was actually in London when the first doodlebugs came over ... my father said, No, it's it's not on fire, it's it's something different. You know, he didn't know what it was, none of us did. It turned out to be a V one doodlebug.
Presenter asks
15:08How early on did you realize what you might be able to achieve in this field?
I think it occurred in stages. I mean, the work that I had been doing up to nineteen seventy one, seventy two was nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR, in solids. And it was only after seeing that that was not a very practical way forward that I started to think quite seriously about systems which contained a lot of mobile water, such as biological tissue.
Presenter asks
27:19How did you feel in that moment when the call came [about the Nobel Prize]?
Well, I was obviously elated, very pleased. I did feel that it was a little bit late in the day, but when I eventually accepted and went to Sweden to the ceremony, the award ceremony, there were physicists there who got the physics prize that year, and one of them was turned 80, and he got his Nobel Prize for work that he did in 1946.
“I distinctly remember saying, Well, I'm quite interested in science and I wouldn't mind being a scientist. And when he finished laughing, he said, Well, now let's be sensible. Let's talk about what you really can do. You have no qualifications”
“If anything, I think I was really regarded as a bit of a destructive kid, you know, because I had the screwdriver out as soon as I could and wanted to know what was inside.”
“I felt quite proud to have been able to do something to help so many people.”
“I think being cast away by myself would be pretty miserable.”