Professor John Mallard
Physicist whose Aberdeen team made the first full-body MRI scanner, a leap forward in medicine
PROFESSOR JOHN MALLARD, who has died aged 94, led the scientific team at Aberdeen University that developed the first all-body Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, but missed out on the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded for the breakthrough, which went to two other scientists.
Several teams were involved in developing the technology, which uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed cross-section images of the inside of the body. In 1976 Peter (later Sir Peter) Mansfield of Nottingham University, was the first to publish a successful MRI scan of a living human body part – a finger. But the problem faced by researchers was that any movement in the patient, such as breathing or beating of the heart, tended to blur the images.
In the 1970s Mallard established a team, including James Hutchison and Bill Edelstein, to build the first MRI full-body scanner, and by 1980 they had developed a new technique, spin-warp imaging, that could produce three-dimensional images unaffected by the movement of patients – a crucial breakthrough.
The first patient in the world to receive a full-body scan was a man from Fraserburgh with terminal cancer. The scan, carried out in Aberdeen on August 28 1980, identified a primary tumour in his chest, an abnormal liver and secondary cancer in his bones.
MRI is now one of modern medicine’s most important diagnostic tools for detecting diseases such as stroke, cancer, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease, and Aberdeen’s “spin-warp” method is standard for today’s scanners.
Mallard received several awards for his work including the Royal Society’s Wellcome Gold Medal and the first senior scientist award given by the International Union of Physical and Engineering Sciences. When Sir Peter Mansfield and Paul Lauterbur, of the University of Illinois, were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for their “seminal discoveries” about the scanning technique, Mallard was delighted that MRI had been recognised but observed that it was “a real pity that all the teams that contributed to making it such a success were not included. Everybody used everybody else’s work.”
John Rowland Mallard was born in Kingsthorpe, Northampton, on January 14 1927, the son of John Mallard, a grocer, and Margaret (née Huckle). From Northampton Town and County Grammar School, he read Physics at University College, Nottingham (now the University of Nottingham), and stayed on to do a PHD on the magnetic properties of uranium.
He joined the Liverpool Radium Institute, where he took part in the early use of artificial radioactivity for measuring thyroid function. In 1953 he moved to the Royal Postgraduate Medical School of the University of London at Hammersmith Hospital, where he built a radioactive isotope scanner based on injecting small quantities of radioactive “tracer” into the body, with the scans showing the increased concentration of the tracer in tumours.
After a few years as reader in the department of physics and biophysics at St Thomas’ Hospital Medical School he moved to the University of Aberdeen in 1965 to take up a newly created chair of medical physics.
The previous year he had published a paper in Nature in which he argued that magnetic resonance might be useful in diagnosing cancer, and when he moved to Scotland he took with him the scanner he had built at Hammersmith. Yet when he started working on his MRI scanner, he found himself facing scepticism: “The powers-that-be thought what I was doing was a long shot and weren’t convinced it would produce significant results,” he recalled.
He and his team set about building their scanner using second-hand equipment and improvising with copper piping from a plumber’s merchant. In 1974 they succeeded in carrying out the first wholebody scan of a mouse. When the first human patient was scanned in 1980, he lay on a tube salvaged from a children’s playground.
The success of the scanner – the Mark I – caused huge excitement in the medical world, but it soon became clear that a new, more sophisticated, machine was needed, for which Mallard and his team would need £250,000 in funding. No British company could be found willing to invest such a sum and Mallard balked at the idea of relocating his team to the US. Finally a Japanese firm came up with the money in exchange for the know-how and sent three of its engineers to work with the Aberdeen team on the Mark II.
In 1982 Mallard set up his own company to exploit the technology but failed to secure backing from City institutions. It remained a source of great irritation to him that historical accounts of the development of MRI tended to imply that it was invented in America, when “all the early development work was done in this country”.
Mallard was also an early advocate of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging, which can produce 3D images of the inside of the body, including of functions such as blood supply, metabolism and receptors in the brain. He brought Scotland’s first PET scan device to Aberdeen after leading a fundraising campaign to pay for the conversion of farm buildings behind Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen to house a second-hand scanner he had obtained from researchers in London.
In 1998 the building was replaced by the John Mallard Scottish PET Centre at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
Mallard was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was appointed OBE in 1992.
In 1958 he married Fiona Lawrance, a medical secretary. She died last year and he is survived by their son and daughter.
Professor John Mallard, born January 14 1927, died February 25 2021