The Birth of a Center Below: Center director Bruce Rosen as a young researcher in Mass General’s NMR program. Opposite: Building 149 rises above the Charlestown Navy Yard in the early 2000s. Photo by Gary Boas.
The following is the story of a research program at Massachusetts General Hospital: a program that entered the world as a small group of physicians and scientists working under the name “the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Center”; grew to encompass teams of investigators designing and building cutting-edge magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technologies; and today, as the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, is one of the premier research centers devoted to the development and application of an array of imaging technologies, with hundreds of researchers and staff working together for the advancement of human health.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. Let’s start, as they say, at the beginning. Some 40 years ago, Mass General was developing a new research program in MRI, an emerging technique that could produce images of soft tissue in the body based on the magnetic properties of the nuclei in the tissue—hence the nuclear magnetic resonance in the program’s name. Because it was noninvasive and did not involve ionizing radiation, MRI offered a promising alternative to other imaging techniques, including computed tomography (CT). The program launched in about 1980 with Mass General cardiologist Gerald Pohost at the helm. Pohost and a handful of other, similarly adventurous researchers and physicians had banded together to address a host of questions using an experimental 1.4-Tesla small animal MRI scanner and a 0.15-Tesla human head scanner that the hospital had recently acquired. (Tesla is the unit of measure applied to the field strength of a magnet.). In a small lab housing the scanner and in nooks and crannies elsewhere in the hospital, they tinkered and talked and generally blazed new trails with the new and largely untested technology. The Pohost-led group made important strides in those early years, both in working out the possibilities of MRI and in exploring the many ways it could benefit specialties from across the hospital. In doing so, they also established a template for and set
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