Edward Lauterbur, the youngest and Paul’s father, was salutatorian for the Holy Angels High School class of 1917. In his short speech he said that “the highest duty that ever comes to man is not to do a deed of prowess or win a material victory, but to endure, suffer and die for truth and country. The vitality of men and nations is measured by their devotion to exalted and unchangeable principles.” The father lived in his son; Paul really was ready “to endure, suffer and die for truth.”
Edward Lauterbur traveled extensively as a representative of the Hobart Company to meet customers and attend trade shows. A very proper man, he left the scene whenever ribald comments were made. He smoked cigarettes constantly but never, ever consumed alcohol. His moral seriousness and tendencies toward the prudish may have stood in the way of career advancement, which required more personable traits. He cared greatly for his children, and they knew it—but he never talked to them about serious concerns, theirs or his own. He loved dogs and horses, roses and music; read widely; was passionate about the news (as read over the radio by Lowell Thomas and Walter Cronkite); and was solidly faithful to the Catholic Church.
Figure 2.1
Edward J. Lauterbur and Gertrude Wagner Lauterbur, Paul’s parents.
At the age of twenty-four, Gertrude Wagner married Edward Lauterbur, thus continuing a close relationship between the two families. Edward had known Gertrude since his first glimpse of her in her baby cot shortly after her birth. She and her brother, Joseph, were first-born twins, and there was a younger sister, Mary Monica, who became a nun in the Holy Cross religious order, rising to become vice president of Dumbarton University in Washington, D.C., and later sent to the Vatican. Their father, Christian Hans Wagner, started life as a carpenter and was listed as “proprietor” in the 1880 census. The Wagner Brothers Coca Cola bottling plant in Tiffin, Ohio, is on the National Register of Historic Places, being of architectural and industrial interest.
I met Paul’s mother only once, in 1987, when she was in her mid-eighties. The Lauterbur family had gathered in Washington to celebrate Paul’s receiving the National Medal of Science from the hands of President Reagan in a Rose Garden ceremony. Paul and I were newly married at the time, and from his descriptions I expected his mother to be severe, formidable, and 100 feet tall. Instead I met a petite, beautiful woman with a full head of silver gray hair, and I found her absolutely charming.
Physically, Paul was like his father, and mentally, that playful wit, he was like his mother. Gertrude and Edward never tried to tell their children who or what to be, and the freedom they gave their children to pursue their own interests was surely one of the important formative influences in Paul’s life. The parents practiced a benign neglect; their policy was to support almost anything that interested their children. Their intellectual support of the children was subtle, such as making garden plantings that would become a botany education. Paul was spared the heavy burden and emotional consequences of early career expectations by his parents; there never was a “my son the doctor” or “my son the CEO” syndrome. On the other hand, there were expectations of ethical behavior, of hard work and usefulness to society. With this in mind, the Lauterbur children were given a secure and loving environment in which to develop into whatever kind of person they were to become: the quiet, bookish Paul (born in 1929), the extroverted and mischievous Joe (born two years later), and the gentle and compassionate Margaret (born in 1934).
The Lauterburs lived in a comfortable two-story house on Ohio Street, a few blocks up the hill from Holy Angels Church and school. Margaret remembers roller-skating down the big hill, supported by her brothers on each side. Gathered around the neighborhood were the Wagners, the Weingartners, the Hillens, and the Hicks; all were related by marriage and enjoyed close friendships that lasted for generations. This was the Catholic neighborhood of the small community, and Holy Angels was the center of the children’s lives. They attended masses offered by Father Lehman (“Remember Father Lehman? This is this and this is so, and boy you listen!” says Margaret), and were taught by the strict Sisters of Charity, remembered best for their respect for authority, insistence on obedience, and determination to instill righteous self-discipline in all their young charges. At Holy Angels Elementary School Paul’s academic record was poor, except in subjects that interested him. Mostly, his thoughts were gloriously far away.
Paul the Boy: “Thinking about Things People Don’t Know about Yet”
All his remaining family, classmates, and peers from his youngest days remember Paul as being somehow different from the other children. He was polite and friendly, they say, but rather reserved and busy with his own interests, which were often beyond their ken. Margaret remembers him as a loving brother but too much older to be a confidant or playmate. She has often described playing boisterous games with Joe or chasing after the dogs, and looking up to see Paul sitting under a large shade tree in the front yard, reading or looking off absently into space. He seemed so strange to her, but she revered him. She still does. She remembers asking her mother, “What is Paul doing out there?” and “Why is he like that?” The answer was that Paul was “thinking about things people don’t know about yet.” His cousin Marianne, two years older than Paul, cannot remember a time he wasn’t interested in science: “Great balls of fire! Paul was interested in science when he was still in his baby cot!”
Figure 2.2
Paul’s first known investigation of the properties of spin.
Tragically, death seized his brother Joe at the age of sixteen, when a train approaching from the east, hidden by the blinding sunrise, hit his car. There were no crossing gates, warning signs, or even speed limits in that era. The ache never left his siblings’ or his parents’ hearts. Edward and Gertrude worked for laws requiring trains to slow down in municipalities. Marianne to this day carries the memory of undemonstrative Ed putting his arm around his wife and kissing her temple as their son’s body was lowered into his grave.
Paul remembers his childhood as a happy one, ideal for a boy such as himself. As a young child he had a village to explore, especially the culverts left over from the Miami and Erie Canal, to be braved from one end to the other. The family always had dogs, and the children were particularly attached to a Saint Bernard named Guard, who would wheel them around in a little dogcart. There were always Dalmatians, and, after a move to a farm in Troy, just as Paul was entering high school, horses, too. The children’s favorite was Lady, a beautiful white of Arabian descent. Lady was very gentle; there is a picture of Margaret at about four years sitting trustingly on the big mare. Then again, Lady was a Lauterbur, and she knew her own mind. Once, when she did not fancy to be ridden, she carried Paul under a low-lying tree limb and knocked him off.
Figure 2.3
Four-year-old Margaret astride Lady.
Paul lived in a world where myriad little creatures could be captured, studied for a while, and then released. His pet snakes and pet skunk became family and neighborhood legends. Margaret remembers a large king snake living in the barn. “Paul invited me to watch it swallow mice whole. I was not too enthused.” A small snake that Paul had captured became ill, and Gertrude, who had a snake phobia, helped him nurse it. Even though the snake resisted their ministrations, Gertrude bonded with the sick baby. The skunk, Mephisto, came when Paul was about twelve. He lived on the roof of the garage just outside Paul’s bedroom window. Mephisto disappeared one night, Paul never knew how, and was sorely missed.
Aunt Anna was a stalwart in the children’s lives. She lived 110 miles away, and each child was allowed a one-week visit per year. Paul always looked forward to his. Fascinated by natural history, she always kept a terrarium in her elementary school classroom, and she gave Paul a subscription to Natural History magazine. Cousin Marianne remembers that when Paul was in seventh or eighth grade, Aunt Anna asked a fellow professor who knew her nephew if he could attend his physics classes. The response: “My dear, he would be bored. He could probably teach this class as well as
me.” Sweet, gentle, and scholarly, Aunt Anna was often overshadowed by stern and determined Aunt Mary. With Aunt Mary, convention was all. There was appropriate behavior and there was inappropriate behavior, and no blurring of the line in between. Aunt Mary visited often, to Gertrude’s dismay, for she resented Mary’s highhanded ways and the theft of her husband’s time and attention.
There were visits to rural Tiffin, Ohio, to their maternal grandparents for two weeks every summer. These were big drives in the family Hudson that Margaret remembers very well, a whole hundred miles at 35 or 40 mph. Paul and Joe, forever polite, held open the car doors as she was seated. The ulterior motive finally dawned: they wanted the window seats.
Two things mattered in Paul’s family: propriety and education. Adults were there to encourage and instruct children, but also to give them plenty of unsupervised time for exploring. Young children have a compelling need to understand the world around them, and the Lauterbur elders understood and nourished this need. Creativity, or genius, is a habit of mind that Paul developed at an early age and never lost. Paul kept his creative energies alive in part by ignoring his elementary school classes in order to think about more interesting things. Paul’s adult genius certainly contained an element of a child’s love of free and unrestrained play. Just as he had in childhood, all his life Paul guarded his intellectual playtime—time for reading and thinking—often to the neglect of real-world responsibilities, including a scientist’s need to apply for grants. Paul’s genius bloomed at an early age, and it appears to have been known to his familiars, including his mother, while he was still a child.
But if Paul was born with creativity, his habit of hard work was learned. In early youth Paul was working to master, at a nearly adult level, academic subjects that interested him, usually ones not even taught until college. As long as she can remember, Marianne envied the test tubes and other scientific paraphernalia in Paul’s bedroom. By middle school he was allowed a chemistry lab in the family basement. He used his allowance to order chemicals and exotic animals by mail. He taught himself taxidermy and had a row of birds preserved in his bedroom. He made himself a microtome to cut sections for microscopic examination, prepared samples himself, and did much peering through the microscope his father had managed to borrow from their local veterinarian. He innocently tried to invent calculus at age twelve but didn’t get further than fumbling with ideas about notations and rules for representing rates of change of orbital parameters. He read extensively, with a special interest in natural sciences, anthropology, and physical sciences.
In his basement laboratory Paul made many strange things and ruined much glassware. He was particularly interested in silicates, or sand. He wondered about these silicon molecules and about the possibility that the silicon atom, with its structural similarities to carbon, could be a basis for life. A typical boy, he was also interested in rockets, and bounced a few off the chicken coop. Trying to make rocket fuel, he ignorantly mixed white phosphorus and potassium chloride. The substance blew up when he stirred it, shooting the beaker’s broken glass all over him and landing him in the hospital for two weeks. He later learned that he’d mixed the same chemicals used to make match heads. He carried splinters of that beaker to his grave.
Nonetheless, Paul would much rather have dealt with the accident and its consequences than not to have been given those wide opportunities for exploration and research. When he recovered, Paul went right back down to his basement lab, with his parents’ approval.
In speaking of his childhood world in the commemorative lecture he gave in Japan in 1994—when he received the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology from the Inamori Foundation2—Paul said:
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of an interest in the natural world, in animals and plants, forest and streams (which also meant hunting and fishing) the earth and the heavens. Those interests broadened to include mathematics, experimentation, evolution and history, and eventually the unseen worlds of forces and atoms. In time, a form of curiosity emerged that has often guided my imagination since. Are some things missing from the world only by accident or for deeper reasons? . . . Complex molecular structures based on silicon do not seem to share the propensity toward life of those based on carbon. Is this difference necessary, or accidental?
My thoughts and some experiments in my home basement laboratory turned toward making molecules containing both carbon and silicon, so as to explore a hybrid organic-inorganic world. I scoured the libraries in my small town and the nearest city to learn what was already known. Incidentally, that was not always as easy as it sounds. If one has interests that seem to go beyond the ordinary subject in the classroom at one’s age, I found that the natural response of a librarian was, “Oh, don’t you wish to see a book on chemistry for children?” I would say, “No, I want the volume of the Journal of the American Chemical Society from 1939.”3
Sometimes adult intervention was required. And so Paul left his childhood, eager for knowledge not for its own sake but as a key to greater understanding.
High School: Budding Chemist
At Sidney High, students were assigned to one of four tracks:
1. Agricultural, for future farmers
2. Industrial, for young men with mechanical interests who might become car repairmen
3. Commercial, including home economics for all the girls who would become housewives with no collegiate interlude (the high school yearbook captioned a photograph, “Slick chicks study statistics for snaring spouses”4)
4. Academic (for the college bound)
Paul’s parents removed him from the parochial school system in part because he had reacted so strongly to its rigidity and discipline. They also seriously considered putting him into the industrial rather than the academic track, even though they were both college graduates themselves. Paul believed this was mainly because of his erratic academic record, excellent in areas that interested him and failing in subjects that did not. Margaret proposes that their parents were afraid of where Paul’s dreaminess might take him, that maybe he needed to be anchored in some valuable technical skill from which he could earn a living.
The move to the farm in 1948 was propitious for Paul but painful for his brother. Joe had been a popular guy in Sidney, with many friends and a spot on the football team. It was very difficult for him to leave all that behind, and being on the farm was isolating, although there were many happy compensations. To Paul, the farm, with its old house, barn, and various outbuildings, was a small paradise. He acquired many duties, such as caring for the horses, mowing the lawn, cultivating the garden, and helping with harvesting. He liked to brag about the heavy work of mucking out the horse stalls, and of breaking the ice on the trough with bare hands so the horses could drink. He also had time for hunting, fishing, and collecting critters.
Paul had two buddies at Sidney High School, Marlan Shepard (who remained at Los Alamos National Laboratory for his entire career) and Fred Whittaker (who became professor of entomology at St. Louis University). They were tied by their love of science; for them it was akin to breathing. Paul chuckled about a note-passing incident between him and Shepard in homeroom. When the teacher confiscated the note, no doubt expecting to find something about girls or sports, she saw instead that it concerned whether gravitation waves are propagated at the speed of light! (A naive question, but one that bright boys with some familiarity with the frontiers of physics of the time could well ask.) Marlan learned of the existence of base twelve mathematics, and the three young men spent hours doing calculations in this really splendid way. The boys also discovered a blackish looking ore in a cliff and decided it looked just like the pictures of uranium ore, a subject of much interest in 1945. Borrowing college textbooks and fetching chemicals from the high school’s storerooms, they tested for the presence of this and other minerals. They were disappointed.
Paul had learned all of high school chemistry early, by reading an older student’s textbook during study hall. Recognizing their pr
ecocious abilities, the young high school chemistry and biology teacher, Mr. Harold McDermott, excused the three boys from their regular classroom material and allowed them to pursue their interests in college-level science and to use the school laboratory during off hours for their improvised experiments. Said Mr. McDermott of Paul, “He would have spent all the time there if I let him,” remembering him as “quiet, focused, with a great sense of self-discipline.”5 When told as an eighty-eight-year-old man that Paul had won a Nobel Prize, beloved teacher McDermott’s answer was, “It doesn’t surprise me whatsoever; I always knew he would do something like that.”6
McDermott had the courage to intervene when some of the boys’ more dangerous experiments came to the attention of the school authorities and they risked being expelled. The boys had dipped paper airplanes in white phosphorus and water, then thrown them out the laboratory’s second-story windows. As the water evaporated, the phosphorus hit the air and ignited the planes.
After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the boys wondered where the energy came from. They knew that the atom uranium (U92) was split, but how? “Well,” they reasoned, “if you split it into ninety-two hydrogens, that would make a really big bang!” Again, their theory shows lively young minds at work with limited information. When the full information became available, in autumn of his sophomore year in high school, Paul read the complete government report on the atomic bomb.7
Paul always told me that he’d been very quiet and shy in high school. His heartthrob had no idea of his feelings for her. Paul started playing chess as a freshman. He beat the seniors, much to their chagrin, and then moved on to win against the local adult expert. So much for that challenge. His grades in high school, as earlier, were far from exemplary. His long run of Ds in typewriting and one in phys ed were offset when, in his junior year, he scored the highest of any student in Ohio on the state chemistry scholarship test. This achievement finally convinced Paul’s parents that he was academic material, though it did not convince his father that a career in chemistry was prudent.
Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI Page 3