Larry Wald and the Three Traumas

If you know Martinos researchers, you know they are often modest and even self-effacing about their accomplishments. It’s a part of their charm. In a recent conversation, MRI Core director Larry Wald framed his early days in the Center as a series of traumas. Whatever challenges he might have faced, he undoubtedly handled them with an endless reserve of skill and aplomb. Still, it’s fun to imagine those days as he describes them—as one fire after another begging to be put out, or maybe an eternal game of whack-a-mole—so we will indulge him in his humble retelling.

Wald joined the Martinos Center in early 1998, after a stint as an instructor at McLean Hospital in Boston. When he arrived, he was named director of human imaging and tasked with maintaining the Advanced NMR-equipped MRI systems in Building 149, in the same spots where Bays 2 and 3 are today. But his tenure in this position would prove short lived; before long, Wald’s role in the Center would change in a somewhat dramatic fashion as the first of his three traumas befell him.

Robert Weisskoff was the head of the MRI Core and chief magnetic resonance physicist at the Martinos Center and the former senior physicist at Advanced NMR Systems who had played an integral role in bringing to the Center the enabling technology for functional MRI. In short, he was an important and stabilizing presence in the Center. But within months of Wald’s arrival, he left his position to embark on a new adventure, going to business school and eventually establishing himself in the world of venture capital and private equity. Today, Wald admits that Weisskoff’s departure “caused a bit of turbulence.” Not because of any interpersonal conflicts or lingering resentment; only because he suddenly found himself in a significantly expanded role—he was now the MRI Core Director.

This, alone, would have been a shock to the system. As it happened, though, the change also came at a critical juncture in the Center’s history. Maybe a month after Weisskoff left the Center, its Advanced NMR scanner began a descent into obsolescence. GE stopped providing regular service for the specialized resonant gradient coils used for fMRI, which were originally made and serviced by Advanced NMR. Finding spare parts grew more and more difficult, and the spare parts the researchers did find were often contaminated. The Center’s scanners were “slowly sinking under the waves, getting more and more unstable,” Wald says. This was the second of his three traumas.

The Center continued for a time with a state-of-the-art GE scanner. It wasn’t long, though, before Bruce Rosen and Greg Sorensen decided to add two more scanners to the Center’s arsenal. And if they were adding scanners, they realized, they might also consider switching vendors. GE was perhaps the top vendor at the time; most of the major MRI research centers were GE sites, from Stanford to the Mayo Clinic, from Penn to Duke. But after reevaluating its needs and what the different vendors could offer, the Center decided to switch to Siemens.

This led to the third and final trauma, Wald says. “We had to pull out two more-or-less working GE scanners and put in Siemens scanners that we were completely unfamiliar with,” upending any number of ongoing studies in the Center for many months at a time. There was a bright side, though: Wald and the others started working with Siemens’ excellent staff, including Andreas Potthast, an engineer working on Siemens’ new 3T system (the Center installed the second 3T system the company ever shipped). Potthast and colleagues from Siemens would become integral members of the team and even embraced as part of the Martinos Center family, a relationship that continues to this day.

Adventures on the High Ts

If Wald thought his job would settle into something resembling a normal routine after the turbulence of the first couple of years, well, he would have been mistaken. In 1998, amidst the initial negotiations with Siemens, he attended the annual meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM) in Sydney, Australia. After the meeting, he took an extra week to go snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. Certainly, no one would argue he didn’t deserve a bit of time away from the lab.

Wald might have though he wouldn’t miss anything too exciting in that one week. Then again, he had already been around the Center long enough to know never to make such a bet. In any event, when he returned to Charlestown, he found Center director Bruce Rosen, researcher Hans Breiter and others in the throes of writing a white paper seeking funding to build the world’s first 7T MRI scanner. The funding came through and, in late 1998, the Martinos team kicked off a project that would occupy Wald for much of the next several years—and usher in another new era of magnetic resonance imaging.