"NMR in 2016– Fruits from Two Centuries of Basic Research"
Kurt Wüthrich
The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA and
ETH Zürich, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland
For the direct observation of transitions between Zeeman levels (Nobel Prize in Physics 1902) by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1952. NMR has then been used in a wide range of fundamental studies in physics, and in the 1960s it became an important analytical tool in chemistry. Based on novel concepts and advances in NMR instrumentation and informatics tools, exciting developments in the early 1970s laid the foundations for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is today a key technique in medical diagnosis (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003 to Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield) and for the use of NMR spectroscopy in modern structural chemistry and biology (Nobel Prizes in Chemistry to Richard R. Ernst 1991 and KW 2002). Fundamental understanding of these advances was greatly helped by Albert Einstein’s 1905 treatise of the Brownian motion described by the English botanist Robert Brown in 1827. Thus NMR is one of the research areas where the results of basic research during the 19th and the first half of the 20th century provided the basis for technological breakthroughs in the second half of the 20th and into 21st century. These now support research in chemistry, structural biology and drug discovery, as well as novel, non-invasive approaches in medical diagnosis, which all contributes to improved quality of daily human life.