Peter Mansfield, the jam jar genius of MRI | Letters

There was an omission from your excellent obituary of Sir Peter Mansfield (21 February), the inventor of magnetic resonance imaging: the role played by the British Technology Group (BTG) in protecting his work. The commercial value of Peter Mansfield’s MRI invention was identified early on by an executive in BTG (previously the National Research Development Corporation), which at that time was entitled to all the intellectual property of university and government research in the UK funded by the public purse.

BTG filed patents to protect the work and then found them being infringed by a major US company which was manufacturing MRI equipment. BTG spent several million pounds on litigation to defend the intellectual property. It was successful in doing so and subsequently licensed the company concerned that company and other international companies who were using the invention, achieving significant income as a result, which it shared with the inventor and his university.

Without BTG’s intervention this would have been another example – like penicillin – of the adage “the British invent, foreigners apply”, and Peter Mansfield would nevernot have achieved the widespread recognition he so rightly deserved.
Dr Peter Tanner
Pamber Heath, Hampshire

• I was a fellow student with Peter Mansfield. We were each the first member of our working-class families to go to university, at a time when fewer than 2% of the population received further education. At college we were separated into sheep and goats to read for either a special (honours) or a pass degree.

MRI had its genesis in Peter’s third-year experimental project, to measure the nuclear magnetic resonance of hydrogen atoms, which was supervised by Jack Powles, later to be the first physics professor at the University of Kent. Peter’s apparatus consisted essentially of a jam jar, half filled with water and surrounded by a coil of enamelled copper wire. For commercial reasons, the use of the technology as a diagnostic technique was later called magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, not NMR, because of cold war, atomic bomb connotations when the National Research Development Corporation, for which I worked later, handled the patenting and licensing of his inventions.
Professor Roger Cullis
Queen Mary centre for commercial law studies, University of London

• With regard to David Lammy’s timely call to bring back night schools rather than grammar schools (Education, 21 February), I note with interest that your obituary for the inventor of MRI scanning, Sir Peter Mansfield informs readers that he studied for his A-levels at evening classes. Those were the days.
David Head
Navenby, Lincolnshire

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