Paul Lauterbur

Paul Christian Lauterbur was an American chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2003 with Peter Mansfield for his work which made the development of magnetic resonance imaging possible.

Lauterbur was of Luxembourgish ancestry. Born and raised in Sidney, Ohio, Lauterbur graduated from Sidney High School, where a new Chemistry, Physics, and Biology wing was dedicated in his honor. He did his undergraduate work at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, which is now known as Case Western Reserve University. As a teenager, he built his own laboratory in the basement of his parents house. His chemistry teacher at school understood that he enjoyed experimenting on his own, so the teacher allowed him to do his own experiments at the back of class. When he was drafted into the Army in the 1950s, his superiors allowed him to spend his time working on an early nuclear magnetic resonance machine he had published four scientific papers by the time he left the Army.

Source: Wikipedia