oy, who was already well known in NMR circles for his work with me on q-space diffraction. Andrew had been in the business side of IT in Sydney and London for nearly a decade. He turned up in Wellington, heard we were starting the company, and expressed his interest in running it. Magritek has never looked back, in its 6th year now, with 21 staff and with export sales of NMR systems around the world. Suddenly I had entered the world of science commercialization, and my university research group was expanded to include NMR technology, along with our continuing work in soft matter and porous media. 
mpaign", a fundraiser involving climbing the Gherkin tower owned by his company.
n generated a major field of research in my laboratory. In 1996 we were introduced to worm-like micelles (WLMs) by visiting Dutch physicist Bas Smeulders. Later, we used NMR microscopy to measure shear banding effects in WLMs, and we have been pursuing the complex rheodynamics of these systems ever since.
In continuing these installments of my scientific reflections, I should say a little more about Nicholas Kurti and Erwin Hahn. Kurti was my scientific "grandfather", one of the brilliant Jewish refugees acquired by the Clarendon Laboratory in the 1930s. He held the record for achieving the lowest laboratory temperature of 1 millionth Kelvin when I first knew him. Nicholas was immensely kind and he and his English wife Gianna regularly hosted graduate students in their home.
science. If any work ever deserved a Nobel Prize, Hahn's discovery of the spin echo certainly did. This is what I wrote of him in my 2011 book, "Translational Dynamics and Magnetic Resonance". "Of all the developments that have assisted NMR measurements of translational dynamics, none is as important as the discovery of the spin echo by Erwin Hahn in 1950. Indeed, it can be argued that the power of 
the spin echo underpins all of modern NMR. The formation of the echo, with its inherent time-reversal properties, not only causes lost signals to re-appear, it also has the effect of removing some nuclear spin interactions while retaining others. Hahn pointed out that in the case where the magnetic field was inhomogeneous, the signal obtained by method was sensitive to translations of spin-bearing molecules, providing, for example, a means of measuring random Brownian motion."
focused physicist to one who saw the wonders of chemistry, of the world of molecules, with all the opportunities for physics that this field of research presented. With Metka Luzar’s talk in my mind, I set about building a pulsed field gradient system that we could attach to the FX60. In that I was assisted by an able graduate student named Craig Trotter. We built the electronics and gradient coil and quickly discovered that there were some technical problems plaguing this method that were ripe for tackling. These included gradient pulse area mismatch, sample vibration, and eddy current effects. By good luck we made some progress, and that led to a fruitful period in which my collaborators and I measured polymer diffusion, as well as small molecule diffusion in anisotropic and heterogeneous environments. I was born, and grew up in Wanganui, where physics seemed to surround me. I built my first crystal set radio while at primary school and was delighted to be able to pick up two radio stations. When I was 10 years old, Sputnik was launched, with many more satellites following, some of which could be seen at night with the naked eye, repeating their orbit after 90 minutes. In my early teens I was a boy chemist, with a backyard laboratory and pursuing adventures that would today be considered foolhardy at best, and criminal at worst. There was a 200-meter-long tunnel in a local hill that led to an elevator that allowed hilltop residents to avoid the 70-meter climb. It made wonderful echoes, over a second apart.
Among that mix of radio waves, molecules, echoes, and the evident triumph of the laws of physics may have been sown the seeds of a life in magnetic resonance (MR). Certainly I had never heard of it. I first came across MR as a final-year physics student at Victoria University of Wellington. But my interests then were in nuclear physics and solid-state physics. I discovered a field of research that combined them, the use of hyperfine interactions to orient radioactive nuclei. And so my doctoral ambitions took me, courtesy of a UK Commonwealth Scholarship, to the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University, where I joined the team of Nick Stone and grandfatherly mentor, Nicholas Kurti. There we used adiabatic demagnetization of paramagnetic salts to get down to 10 milliKelvin, at which temperature the hyperfine interaction would overwhelm the Boltzmann energy to cause radioactive nuclei in a ferromagnetic host metal, attached to the cold finger of the apparatus, to align, so directing their gamma rays preferentially along the quantization axis. The degree of orientation could be used as a measure of the interaction strength, so that nuclear magnetic moments or local fields could be measured. But by far the best way of precisely measuring that interaction was by sweeping an RF field in the vicinity of the Larmor frequency. At resonance, the gamma rays would suddenly change their angular distributio
n and the axial count rate would change dramatically.
So that was my introduction to magnetic resonance, a phenomenon detected through gamma emissions! It wasn’t until the last year of my DPhil that I came across Faraday detection and the mainstream. In 1973 I had the chance to go to a conference in Krakow, Poland, the 1st Specialized Colloque Ampere. It was a most remarkable meeting and one that completely changed my professional life. I knew only one person there, Erwin Hahn, a regular Oxford visitor of Nicholas Kurti. Alex Pines presented his work, Proton Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy. Peter Mansfield spoke about nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) diffraction in solids. Someone asked if he had seen the paper by Lauterbur, Fourier Zeugmatography, which had just come out in Nature. And a young graduate student from the Ljubliana group, Metka Luzar spoke about using pulsed magnetic field gradients to measure diffusion in liquid crystals. I was fascinated. Many years later, in the early 1990s, I met up with Metka at an NMR meeting in Portoroz, on the tiny coastline of her Slovenian homeland. I sat down next to her and said: Metka Luzar, you changed my life. I am sure she thought me quite mad. Sadly, she died of cancer less than a decade later.
For six days Miang and I have had Chris with us. He flew back to the UK yesterday, and I have to admit, it was hard to say goodbye. He is a most extraordinary man, an accomplished surgeon, about to take up a consultant's post at Guy's Hospital in London, and an all-round wonderful person. Chris has a very kind bedside manner and he has been particularly kind to his old dad.
