Swiss chemist and physicist Richard Ernst, considered the father of magnetic resonance tomography for medicine, awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Friday 5 June at the age of 87 in Winterthur, Canton of Zurich. His family made it known today. The former professor at the ETH Zurich had been living in a home for the elderly since the beginning of last year. He was awarded the Nobel for having developed “nuclear magnetic resonance, obtaining one of the most important instrumental techniques in chemistry”. His contributions to the development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, also called NMR spectroscopy, paved the way for magnetic resonance tomography.
Born in Winterthur on August 14, 1933, after earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and then a doctorate from the Zurich Polytechnic, Ernst worked from 1963 to 1968 as a researcher at Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California. Returning to the Zurich Polytechnic, he was first assistant, then assistant professor and associate; since 1976 he was full professor of physics-chemistry laboratory. Ernst’s research mainly concerned various theoretical and applicative aspects of the analysis technique based on nuclear magnetic resonance. During his stay at Varian he developed (1966) the system commonly referred to as Ft-Nmr, i.e. of resonance coupled to the Fourier transform, which allows to multiply the sensitivity of the NMr spectroscopy method, used up to then, even by a hundred times.
After returning to Zurich, Ernst continued his research using pulsed radio frequencies instead of continuous bands, and developing (1975-76) a new two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy technique (referred to as NMr-2D). Ernst has received numerous honors, including the Wolf Prize for Chemistry (1991), the Horowitz Prize (1991) and the Marcel Benoist Prize (1986), and has been awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of Research from more than 16 universities. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the Royal Academy of Sciences in London, the Deutsche Akademie Leopoldina, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.