William Henry Oldendorf

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William Henry Oldendorf (born March 27, 1925 in Schenectady , New York , † December 14, 1992 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American neurologist .

Career

Oldendorf finished high school at 15 and went to Union College in Schenectady for three years . He received his Medical Doctor (MD) from Albany Medical College in New York in 1947 . He then worked for three years in psychiatry at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady. This was followed by two years of military service as a medical officer at the US Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island . He then went to Minneapolis to the University of Minnesota Clinic . In 1956 he moved to the medical faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he became professor of neurology and psychiatry.

One of his main areas of work was the blood-brain barrier . To research them, he developed a number of new methods that are very often based on radionuclides. At the University of California, Oldendorf was a pioneer in the development of computed tomography in the early 1960s . He published the first article on radiographic tomography in 1961 and received the world's first patent for a tomograph in 1963. But Oldendorf's work on computed axial tomography (CAT) received little attention at the time. Ten years later, the future Nobel Prize winner Godfrey Hounsfield developed Oldendorf's ideas further and built the first computer tomograph. Oldendorf was not considered by the Nobel Committee when the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1979, which was still very controversial years later. In 1975, Hounsfield and Oldendorf received the Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research , the highest medical-scientific award in the United States, for their work . Oldendorf also received the Ziedses des Plantes Prize together with Hounsfield in 1974. A number of other awards followed. In 1981 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 1991 he was elected the first neurologist to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He was also a founding member of the American Society for Neuroimaging (ASN).

William Henry Oldendorf died at the age of 67 of complications from heart disease. He left behind his wife Stella and three sons.

Books

  • W. Oldendorf: The Quest for an Image of the Brain: Computerized Tomography in the Perspective of Past and Future Imaging Methods. Raven Press, 1980, ISBN 0-89004-429-5 .
  • W. Oldendorf and W. Oldendorf Jr .: Basics of Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Verlag Springer, 1988, ISBN 0-89838-964-X .

In addition, over 250 articles in various specialist magazines bear the name of Oldendorf.

literature

  • JC Mazziotta, RC Collins: William H. Oldendorf, MD (1925-1992). In: Journal of computer assisted tomography. Volume 17, Number 2, 1993, pp. 169-171, ISSN  0363-8715 . PMID 8454740 .
  • WH Blahd: In memoriam. (PDF; 329 kB) In: The Journal of Nuclear Medicine 34, 1993, pp. 871-872.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b W. J. Broad: Riddle of the Nobel debate. In: Science . Volume 207, Number 4426, January 1980, pp. 37-38, ISSN  0036-8075 . PMID 6985744 . doi : 10.1126 / science.6985744
  2. ^ WH Oldendorf: Isolated flying spot detection of radiodensity discontinuities - displaying the internal structural pattern of a complex object. In: IRE transactions on bio-medical electronics. BME-8 January 1961, pp. 68-72, ISSN  0096-1884 . PMID 13730689 .
  3. ^ SM Wolpert: Neuroradiology classics. In: AJNR. American journal of neuroradiology. Volume 21, Number 3, March 2000, pp. 605-606, ISSN  0195-6108 . PMID 10730661 .
personal data
SURNAME Oldendorf, William Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American neurology
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Schenectady , New York
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1992
Place of death Los Angeles , California