7T at the Martinos Center: An Origin Story

This is the story of the world’s first 7T MR scanner—of how the scanner was built with money that may have been seized from drug runners in stealth boats and that was definitely handed over to the Martinos Center by a former CIA operative.

Really, it is.

The story goes like this. One day in about 1998, Center director Bruce Rosen found himself sitting in his office chatting with the head of the Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center (CTAC) in the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the office of the “Drug Czar” in the US federal government. Al Brandenstein was a colorful character, Rosen says—among other things, he had spent time in the seventies working with the CIA in Southeast Asia; doing what, he could not say—and their conversation proved a lively and entirely enjoyable one.

The introduction to Brandenstein came by way of Mass General Psychiatry colleagues and collaborators Steve Hyman and Hans Breiter, who, along with the Psychiatry department’s Randy Gollub and a team of Martinos researchers, had performed the first fMRI study of the psychopathology of drug addiction. Hyman had since moved to the National Institutes of Health and through his work there met Brandenstein. Recognizing their common goals, he suggested Brandenstein travel to Boston meet with Breiter and Rosen.

What were those goals? CTAC had previously funded research with positron emission tomography to try to gain better understandings of the neural mechanisms of addiction, in part using money seized in drug raids, seized from the backs of boats or cars or whatever other means of transport. “They used that money, of course, to buy radar and high-speed boats for drug interdiction,” Rosen says, “in other words, to try to reduce the supply of drugs. But Brandenstein was rather visionary and also had the notion that he would invest in reducing the demand for drugs.”

As their conversation began to wind down, Brandenstein looked at Rosen and asked, “How can we help you?” Not expecting a direct offer like this, Rosen quickly scanned a mental list of possibilities. He and colleagues in the Center had been considering a couple of large-scale projects. For example, they had been toying with the idea of installing a magnetoencephalography (MEG) system, another emerging technology at the time, with a price tag of maybe $4 million. “But if someone is asking, what do you want,” Rosen says, “you might as well pick the most expensive thing you can think of.”

Tommy Vaughan, another Center researcher, had been promoting the idea of building a 6T scanner; at the time, the highest field strength available with MRI was 3T. Rosen knew from previous conversations with Vaughan that developing MR scanners cost roughly a million dollars per Tesla, so his 6T scanner would be about a $6 million venture.

Rosen barely skipped a beat in responding. “We would like to build a 7T scanner.”

Hold on. 7T? “Well, I figured, we’re not going to get all the money we want,” he explains, more than two decades later, “and when they do the 10 percent cut, we’ll still have enough for a 6T scanner.”

This day was full of surprises, though. Brandenstein asked how much the 7T scanner would cost. Rosen explained it would be about a million dollars per Tesla. The one-time CIA operative considered this for a moment, then looked up and said, “We can do that.” With those four words and a short white paper written in the following weeks, the Office of National Drug Policy had committed to supporting a 7T MR scanner at the Martinos Center.

In the image above: “The Deep Vascular Architecture of the Human Brain,” a 7T image produced by Michaël Bernier, a postdoctoral fellow working with the Center’s Jon Polimeni, was a finalist in the 2019 Mass General Research Institute Image Contest.