Ernst, Richard Robert (1933-2021), a Swiss physical chemist, made great advances in the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for mapping out the structure of molecules, identifying the presence of chemical substances, and tracking the course of chemical reactions. He received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1991 for this work. See Magnetic resonance imaging .
At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, Ernst worked on NMR, a phenomenon discovered in the mid-1940’s by American scientists Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell (see Bloch, Felix ; Purcell, Edward Mills ). In the technique based on NMR, researchers study atomic nuclei by applying a magnetic field to the nuclei while scanning them with radio waves of carefully controlled frequencies. At just the right combination of magnetic field strength and radio frequency, the nucleus absorbs energy from the scanning radio waves and re-emits it as a detectable signal.
Ernst was born in Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland. Experimenting as a teenager with chemicals found in the attic of his home convinced him that he wanted to become a chemist. He took his first degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. After gaining his degree in 1957, he began postgraduate research at the Institute.
Ernst completed his thesis in 1962 and joined Varian Associates, a medical technology company in Palo Alto, California, in the United States. There, he played a large part in the development of an advanced system of NMR called Fourier-transform NMR spectroscopy. Varian patented the process, but other companies developed commercial instruments based on it.
After an extensive trip through Asia, Ernst returned to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich to head an NMR research group. The developments that he pioneered there led to the use of NMR to discover the three-dimensional structure of molecules, and especially of giant biomolecules (molecules involved in the life processes of animals and plants). His work also transformed all the applications of NMR, making it a sensitive instrument for determining the chemical composition of compounds, for imaging living tissues (in medicine it is called MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging), and for understanding the interactions of atoms in chemical reactions. Ernst died on June 4, 2021.
