Word: hounsfield
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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...
Five years later, Hounsfield attacked the same puzzle for EMI, solved it in much the same way and applied it first to a prototype computerized head scanner, then to a body scanner, both of which EMI patented. These devices were able to distinguish soft tissues and organs and spot abnormalities by producing television images shaded according to the density of the tissue. Since then, widespread use of the scanner has drawn critics who argue that the machine's hefty price-up to $700,000 and more-drives up the cost of medical care at hospitals that could...
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 said that he and Hounsfield have never met and did not collaborate on the project. "I'm not sure if he even read my articles," he added...