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Professor Paul Christian Lauterbur, who died on Tuesday aged 77, won - with the British physicist Sir Peter Mansfield - the 2003 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, for the creation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Lauterbur was born and educated in Ohio. He got his first academic post at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and over the next 15 years his research focus shifted more and more towards medicine, though he continued to teach chemistry.
By the time his work on MRI 30 years earlier was recognised by the Nobel committee, his research had moved into other areas.
MRI allows doctors to view extraordinarily detailed images of the internal workings of the body, revealing, for example, whether back pain is caused by pressure on a nerve or the spinal column, showing how the heart operates, or providing "maps" for surgeons operating on cancers.
