Richard Ernst, Nobel-Winning MRI Pioneer, Dies At 87

Richard Ernst was awarded a Nobel "for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy" in 1991.

Richard Ernst, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, has died at the age of 87, the ETH Zurich university announced Tuesday. Ernst died on Friday in Winterthur, the city outside Zurich where he was born in 1933. NMR spectroscopy can be used to study the interaction of atoms and their neighbouring atoms in molecules, said ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Scientists use the method to determine the three-dimensional structure of molecules.