Erik Odeblad
Erik Odeblad (born January 21, 1922 in Kristinehamn ) is a Swedish physician, to whom the first applications of NMR in medicine are ascribed.
Odeblad studied medicine in Stockholm with a doctorate in 1952 and then went to the Karolinska Institute . As a post-graduate student , he was on a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley . There he also met Felix Bloch , one of the pioneers of NMR. When asked about the possibility of using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in medicine, Bloch turned him down (Bloch was only interested in applications in physics). Back in Sweden he built his own NMR spectrometer with the physicist Gunnar Lindström and used it to examine tissue samples (published in Acta Radiologica in 1955) and found differences in the relaxation times. Further work on the application of NMR in medicine followed. His main job was to train as a gynecologist at the Sabbatsberg Hospital of the Karolinska Institute (his specialty was fertility studies). In 1966 he received his doctorate in physics and became professor of medical biophysics at Umeå University , where he retired in 1988.
His contribution had long been forgotten (especially since he worked in a less prestigious medical field) and was overshadowed by campaigns by physician Raymond Damadian of Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn to present himself as a pioneer of NMR in medicine. He claimed to have used NMR to differentiate between healthy and diseased tissue for the first time and received a great deal of attention because he claimed to be able to distinguish between healthy and tumor tissue with NMR, which he patented, but later turned out to be an error. In 2012 Odeblad received the European Magnetic Resonance Award.
Web links
- Peter Rinck, Europe celebrates the forgotten pioneer of MRI: Dr. Erik Odeblad, 2012
- Magnetic Resonance, Early Applications in Medicine and Biology
Individual evidence
- ↑ Odeblad, Lindström, Some preliminary observations on the proton magnetic resonance in biological samples, Acta Radiologica 1955
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Odeblad, Erik |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swedish medic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 21, 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kristinehamn |