Word: cormack
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week the phones jangled for nine more winners, who, following the medicine award announced the previous week -to Allan Cormack, 55 (U.S.), and Godfrey Hounsfield, 60 (British)-completed this year's prize slate of eleven. The 1979 list of winners is notable for several reasons. For once, the often controversial Peace Prize went to an individual beyond criticism or calumny: Mother Teresa, 69, who has spent a selfless lifetime working in the slums of Calcutta. The prize for literature went to the Greek lyric poet Odysseus Elytis. The twin economics prizes went to men whose concern has been...
They had never met, never corresponded. But on opposite sides of the Atlantic, U.S. Physicist Allan Cormack, 55, of Tufts University, and Research Engineer Godfrey Hounsfield, 60, of the British firm EMI Ltd., brooded over the same mathematical puzzle and independently reached the same solution. The puzzle: how to produce an X-ray image of tissue at any depth within a patient. The result: the CAT (for computerized axial tomography) scanner, a medical marvel now used in hospitals round the world. Last week the two scientists learned that they have something else in common: they will share the 1979 Nobel...
...Cormack took the first step. A native of Johannesburg, South Africa, he became intrigued in 1956 by the difficulty doctors had in obtaining X-ray pictures of the brain. Because the cranium is so thick, they could make an X-ray beam "see" an abnormality only by injecting a patient with tracer dyes or air bubbles. When Cormack immigrated to the U.S. that year (he became an American citizen a decade later), he began exploring the physics of how X rays pass through differing body parts. Dividing this passage into cross-sectional slices, he found he could calculate the absorption...
Neither winner seemed prepared for the honor. At a hectic press conference, a stunned Cormack tried to describe his life. Said he: "I've always been in my little ivory tower and I'd like to get back to it." Hounsfield, a reticent bachelor whose ideas often come on his "rambles" through the countryside and whose recent purchase of a small house consumed "half my worldly wealth," so far sees only one imminent change in his life: he plans to put a laboratory in his living room...
...Cormack first left South Africa because Harvard offered him a position. Although he was not very happy about the political situation in his country, "it wasn't a primary consideration" in leaving, he said...