The Life and Science of Jack Belliveau Mark Cohen, a neuroscientist who in the early 1990s was a young faculty member in the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, paused for a moment before addressing the crowded conference room in downtown Boston. “Somehow,” he said, when he finally spoke, in a soft but deliberate tone, “I feel like I’m a character in Jack’s dream.” It was a warm summer’s afternoon in 2014 and friends and colleagues had come together to remember Jack Belliveau, the Martinos Center investigator and fMRI pioneer. Belliveau published, in the November 1, 1991, issue of Science, the first report of brain activation measured with magnetic resonance imaging, the paper accompanied by the now-iconic cover showing a slice of a brain in a cutaway image of a human head, small areas of it lit up in response to a visual stimulus. While the symposium was organized around his astounding accomplishments in functional MRI and multimodal imaging, speakers one after the other spoke of the personal traits they knew in Belliveau—the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, the unchecked enthusiasm and the unwavering vision—that made these accomplishments possible. And they told stories, often very funny and always very warm stories. Stories of how Belliveau revolutionized the field of biomedical imaging, but also of the impact he had on their own lives and careers.
The Roots of a Revolution The origins of Jack Belliveau’s life’s work date back to the late 1970s, when he was a junior in high school. He started thinking about the brain, about capturing and storing thought, when his father passed away, said Rod Tayler, a childhood schoolmate who flew across the country so he could pay tribute to his old friend. This idea, the possibility of preserving someone’s consciousness even after they have left us, took root and continued to grow, especially when he began to consider his mother’s own mortality. He loved his mother dearly, revered her, really, and would do whatever he could to hold on to her. This is an essential part of the fMRI tale. As a number of the speakers reminded us, Belliveau’s vision for the technology that would become fMRI was driven by a desire to keep his mother with him, by downloading her consciousness onto a chip. “He really would like to capture a person’s soul in a portrait, a picture that could be recorded and seen,” said Van Wedeen, another young faculty member in the Center at the time of the early fMRI experiments. “It really was his mother.” And as all of them agreed, this extraordinary woman, a church organist and an amateur pilot who made whatever sacrifices were necessary to provide for her son, her only child, was a worthy inspiration for a neuroimaging revolution. The narrative picks up again in the late 1980s, when Belliveau joined the MGH-NMR Center. Tom Brady, the director of the Center at the time, recalled meeting “this skinny, bright-eyed guy named Jack” who was looking for a new lab in which to pursue his interests in the brain after his initial research in MR spectroscopy. “His last name is French but Jack portrayed himself as an Irishman,” Brady said. “I liked him immediately.” Belliveau quickly integrated into the Center and set to work developing his ideas about the brain. 18