UCSF Oral History Program
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, clinical medicine was transformed by the advent of non-invasive imaging techniques that could be used to diagnose and guide effective treatment in a variety of disorders. In the atmosphere of the enormous clinical utility of CT scanning in the 1970s, physicians, scientists, and engineers in American and British corporate and university settings began to devise methods to utilize nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for scanning the living human body, hoping to distinguish diseased from normal tissue. This led to a cascade of R&D investment, and by 1984 a dozen companies were seeking FDA pre-market approval for a new type of clinical scanner.
In 1975, placing it squarely in the midst of this "race," the UCSF Department of Radiology funded a small startup R&D operation involving a handful of engineers and physicists charged with the task of developing MRI as a viable scanning instrument for soft tissues in the human body. Enthusiasts predicted that the new noninvasive technology of MRI, which omitted the dangers of ionizing radiation, would eclipse CT within a few years, but the circuitous path to development belied this early optimism. This collection examines the technical development of MRI within the UCSF Radiological Imaging laboratory and its adaptation as an accepted new technology in the late twentieth-century medical marketplace.
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