Searching and Researching

An Autobiography of a Nobel Laureate

Richard R. Ernst, Matthias Meili

• Editorial: Jenny Stanford Publishing
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429695
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Chemistry

In the last 130 years, 30 Swiss people have won a Nobel Prize, and one of them is Richard R. Ernst. He laid the foundation for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which revolutionized medical diagnostics across the globe. In his autobiography, which the scientist completed shortly before he passed away at the age of 87, he talks about his life.

Prof. Ernst grew up in a family long-established in Winterthur, Switzerland, however his childhood and adolescence were overshadowed by a demanding father. He talks in detail about the start of his career in the 1960s, when he made a number of key discoveries at Varian Associates, Palo Alto, USA, as well as about his return to ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and the shark tank that university research is. The highly talented chemist reveals how his passion for Himalayan art began while travelling in Nepal, which ended in him building up one of the most significant collections of thangkas – the tantric Buddhist scrolls. In this book, Prof. Ernst discusses openly and directly about all aspects of his life, with humility and a wry sense of humor.

Return to ETH, 1968–1990

A hard landing in Switzerland

Following five productive and inspiring years in California, my return to Zurich in spring 1968 felt like being thrown back into the Dark Ages. I had nothing I needed. I felt isolated at ETH, I had no support and the equipment I had at my disposal was antiquated and totally unfit for my work. The one ray of light was my frequent exchange of letters with Wes Anderson. In a message sent just two weeks after arriving back at the end of April, I pulled no punches in letting him know how bad things were at ETH: “I feel that there is a good challenge to try to form a productive NMR group,” I wrote. “One feels pretty much isolated and does not know where to start, it is completely different from the start at Varian. One is not even introduced to anybody and does not know what the neighbour is doing, except that he is building some kind of a complicated instrument and probably does not know what to use it for.”

There were various reasons for my returning to the university, despite having sworn just five years previously that I would never set foot in it again. Firstly, the situation at Varian Associates had changed. I was increasingly being given work that I had little interest in doing and the new decision-makers in the company had not recognized the potential of our Fourier transform method. They had failed to see that the method produced results far more quickly than the slow scanning method from the Felix Bloch era, or that being able to take faster measurements automatically meant greater sensitivity in NMR methods. It was more efficient all round: You needed less material for the sample and the base magnetic field did not need to be as strong in the experiment, which reduced electricity costs. The project would have been a real cash cow. While Varian patented the invention in the US at the end of October 1969 as Anderson-Ernst patent no. 3.475.680 (for which I even received a small bonus of around 100 dollars), they did not push forward with research in this area. Although Wes and I had produced some extremely promising results, it would have taken a lot more research and development to be commercially viable. Rather tellingly, Varian was not the first company to consistently apply our methods in a spectrometer; instead, it was the German-Swiss firm Bruker, which in 1969 began to develop a new spectrometer concept based on the

But the manager at Varian had something different in mind for me: I should either focus on projects that would quickly produce commercially viable products or I could become a service technician for existing product lines. Neither of these options appealed to me. I was never that interested in the commercial aspect of our work, it just wasn’t in my nature. I much preferred perfecting and developing measurement equipment rather than simply using it. And I wanted to pursue a career in research. Each success simply whetted my appetite further.

Considerations regarding our family also played a part in our decision to return to Switzerland: Magdalena did not want our children to go to school in the US – “Having Mickey Mouse in the children’s room is not to my taste,” she would say at the time. Our American friends had some trouble understanding our decision. They were confused as to why we would voluntarily swap the exciting, progressive atmosphere in Silicon Valley for the “backward-looking” Old Continent.

It was then in 1967 that my PhD supervisor Hans Heinrich Günthard got in touch, offering me a position as a research assistant at the ETH Laboratory of Physical Chemistry. Following my previous departure and Hans Primas’ change of direction towards theoretical chemistry, NMR research there had been abandoned. However, now Günthard wanted to bring this field back to life, primarily as a means to complete his institute’s portfolio of modern analysis methods based on the fundamentals of physics.

He definitely had a good nose in this regard. Thanks to their precision and ability to provide meaningful results, these physical methods had come to dominate chemistry since the Second World War and there had been a sea change in the way they could be applied. As Günthard himself had specialized increasingly in optical spectroscopy, however, he needed to find the right people to work on NMR methods – and so he recruited me. I knew Günthard and appreciated that working together with him on a constructive basis could be difficult, so the idea of returning to work with him was disconcerting to say the least. But ultimately, I had no real choice. I had since become so specialized in my field that there were perhaps just a handful of jobs in the world that would be suitable for me. So I accepted Günthard’s job offer even though he was “only” taking me on as a research assistant, his “underling”.

Richard Ernst at the age of about 36, photographed in Winterthur. After returning from the USA, he and his young family moved back into his mother’s house.

When I rejoined ETH, I had very few resources at my disposal – either in terms of money or staff, both of which I urgently needed to properly continue my research. I was given a small office in the new departmental building on Universitätsstrasse. I had the impression that my achievements in California barely registered with my peers in the Old World. I had come back with some outstanding results and solid publications under my belt, and had performed numerous theoretically sound experiments and even developed innovative computer applications to accompany them. It would be fair to say that I had brought NMR methods into the digital age. I had reasonably expected that I – a leading light in NMR methodology – would have been inundated with invitations to conferences, universities, companies in the industry, and so forth. But I got nothing of the sort. My work had either been ignored, or there was simply no interest in innovative research.

I was given sole responsibility for operating the various NMR equipment. In addition to my research work, I was placed on 24-hour call-out for chemists wanting to analyze their synthetic substances in the lab as quickly as possible. However, we only had a smaller spectrometer, which was mainly for students to practice with. Apart from that, there were the old devices lying around that Hans Primas had built many years previously. “Nobody took yet a meaningful spectrum on it,” I wrote to Wes, “there are no data about sensitivity or resolution available.” I continued: “Unfortunately, there is not even an electronics technician around, so I will have to do some down-to-earth electronics myself.” In light of this, it was practically impossible to continue my own research. While Günthard considered getting the lab a new, more powerful 220 megahertz spectrometer with superconducting magnets, money was tight. And even this device would have been completely unsuitable for my work.

I felt like I was being deliberately obstructed. The atmosphere was one of jealousy, with the fight for recognition and resources constantly bubbling under the surface. My view of Hans Heinrich Günthard went further downhill, and I became ever more critical of him. He would not tolerate having people around him who attempted to compete with him or question his authority. He was driven solely by objectivity and scientific thought, always emphasizing the rational motivation behind all his decisions and insisting that his own personal views were of no importance. However, he would often react to things in a completely irrational way and make decisions that nobody could understand. He would grant his favor like a monarch, working really well together with his closest staff, all the while refusing to accept any comments, ideas and certainly not criticism from “bad colleagues” like me. “We’ve known that for ages already” or “well that’s obvious”, he would always respond when I tried to contribute a new idea. As his “servant”, I was there to do whatever he wanted and he was there to reap the benefits of his colleagues’ work. Hans Heinrich Günthard was a strange man, who never let me see behind his mask. He was never interested in personal matters; all that mattered to him was results. The person behind the research was of no interest to him. When I – his “employee” – won the Nobel Prize, he briefly acknowledged this and then quickly moved onto the next item on his agenda.

After six months, I was given a lab technician to help me; “not the greatest, but he’ll probably get better,” I wrote to Wes in November 1968. Finding a capable programmer was still impossible because – with the exception of the experts in the Institute of Applied Mathematics – there was almost nobody at ETH who had any real knowledge of computers, knowledge that was key to making progress in our field. “People here are only just discovering the benefits of computers,” I wrote in one of my letters back to Silicon Valley, where scientists had long been relying on digitalization to make progress in their fields.

My area of research also had a problem insomuch as it was struggling to attract up-and-coming scientists. I complained to Wes that “there’s barely any new students joining our department; people are scared of the mathematics that the subject requires.” However, I felt partly responsible for this myself as starting in autumn 1968, I too had to deliver lectures to students. I had submitted my habilitation thesis while I was still in California and had finally become an outside lecturer. However, the courses that I then had to teach undergraduate students were somewhat daunting. I was still yet to overcome my fear of speaking in front of people and I spent many a sleepless night worrying about making a fool out of myself in front of students.

For better or worse, I just got on with the difficult situation at ETH. Instead of discussing my ideas with colleagues at ETH, I instead did so with Wes Anderson across the Atlantic via airmail. We sounded out the potential of the Fourier transform, considered new ways to excite the magnetic nuclei and discussed all the potential methods there were to use NMR spectroscopy both in theory and practice. Wes would frequently ask me questions about my ideas and the projects I was working on; in turn, I would report to him on both my successes and failures and the work being undertaken by groups I was close to. I wasn’t just friends with Wes – on returning from California I had agreed to continue acting as a consultant for Varian Associates, for which I received a small paycheck each month. I was not always able to meet these expectations as months could go by without my being able to complete any useful experiments. This burden weighed heavily on my shoulders and must have been apparent in my letters to Wes, even though they nominally dealt with scientific questions. This is the only reason I can think of for him sending me the following request in January 1969: “Richard, we all miss you very much here at Varian,” wrote Wes, “and I would like to ask you to seriously consider returning. We could offer you better conditions, more freedom and responsibility, salary increase from your previously salary, and the department managership of Forrest Nelson’s old department. Please let me hear your response to this proposal.”

I took my time to think over his offer and it was all of six months later at the end of July 1969 – by which point we had since exchanged several other letters dealing mainly with scientific matters – that I answered his question: “I never answered your question about coming back to Palo Alto. We finally decided to stay in Switzerland [...] We certainly do not have it better here than we had it in Palo Alto, but we do not have it so much worse that we could decide to leave our home country. Just in the moment, we have to stay, otherwise I probably would lose my job. It is really very hard to advance here. I do not know, when I will get an assistant professorship only. With my very best regards, yours, Richard.” I was struggling with the fact that I was yet to be offered a permanent position at ETH – after all, I had a family to feed.

Then in autumn 1969, I was awarded the Ružička Prize, a prestigious award for young researchers, which is still presented today. I was proud to finally see my name among the impressive list of previous winners. I had worked towards this honor while completing my dissertation, but had never quite got there, but now my time had come. I was awarded the prize for my “comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the problems of increasing sensitivity” in the area of nuclear magnetic resonance. This was based on my work and publications about the Fourier transform, which I produced together with Wes in California.

Unfortunately, there was a cloud hanging over this success as I had a guilty conscience with regards to my friend Wes. It took me six months to write to him to tell him about this “unexpected” honor that had been bestowed upon me and even then, I felt embarrassed. “I am only telling you,” I wrote, “because I have you to thank for a lot of what was said in the speech about my work, especially the work on improving sensitivity and the Fourier transform spectroscopy.” This was not a problem for Wes, ever the generous type: “You are right to be proud of the huge amount of work you put in to improving sensitivity and the Fourier transform spectroscopy. I’d like to congratulate you for your excellent work.”

In reality, however, I was simply getting nothing done at ETH. Theoretically, I had a great many ideas for experiments, but in practice it was impossible to try them out. To do so would have required properly designed spectrometers, more powerful computers and above all, help from a programmer. So I had to write most of the programs myself. “I still don’t have a good example of a linear measurement,” I complained to Wes in September 1969. “I’m still having difficulty implementing the fast Fourier transform. The interpolation isn’t working.” And so it went on. The most annoying thing was that the measurements generated by the NMR spectrometers I had were constantly being interfered with by the trams passing by in the street outside. The electric tram heading towards Irchel in northern Zurich ran right past our lab. Every time a tram passed by, the stray radiation from the tram lines massively interfered with our magnetic field. To obtain a precise measurement, a stable magnetic field is a must. An analysis showed that the electromagnetic stray field from a tram could be detected several hundred meters away. I wrote to Wes complaining that there was not a single location at ETH where we could conduct our experiments without our spectrometers being disturbed and I included a small sketch illustrating just how much trams interfered with our readings. The only way to obtain reasonable measurements was to conduct our experiments between half past midnight and four o’clock in the morning when the trams were not running – hardly the ideal time to be at work.

Letter to Wes Anderson dated July 27, 1969. With a sketch, Richard Ernst illustrated how the Zurich streetcars disturbed the NMR measurements in his laboratory at the ETH Zurich.

Kurt Wüthrich on his appointment as assistant professor at ETH Zurich in 1972. The 2002 Nobel Prize winner came to ETH in 1969, one and a half years after Richard Ernst.

On top of all this, office space was becoming a rare commodity. Eighteen months after I arrived back at ETH, a young, confident researcher named Kurt Wüthrich also returned from the US. He had accepted a job as a chemistry researcher at the newly founded Laboratory for Molecular Biology, which later became the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biophysics. Even before he arrived, my new “old” boss Hans Heinrich Günthard had asked me whether Kurt Wüthrich could squeeze in alongside us in our offices, which given the already tight working conditions, I was less than impressed with. “I’ll make it work somehow,” was my less than enthusiastic reply, before nevertheless adding that “it’s great that he’s coming to ETH!” So in those first months, we literally worked closely side-by-side, both of us hidden away in converted temporary offices on the roof of the physical chemistry building. But there were soon disagreements over how research funding and resources should be allocated, and over access to computer time and measuring equipment, which put a real strain on me as the person responsible for the pool of equipment. The situation was diffused somewhat when Kurt Wüthrich moved to the new building on the Hönggerberg a little more than a year after he came to ETH.

A shot across the bows

By this point, I was 36 years old and it seemed that I would fail to achieve any of my scientific goals. Having to take responsibility for the inadequate pool of equipment was the source of many a sleepless night. I felt overwhelmed and impeded, and it took me back to the feeling I once had when I was completing my ill-fated military service. I was undergoing my officer training and was ranked as a sort of “assistant commander”. We were on a major operational exercise. It was cold, raining, and getting dark in a small village in the canton of Aargau. I was responsible for more than fifty recruits and was tasked with finding them emergency overnight accommodation as well as a camouflaged shelter to protect our vehicles from supposed air attacks. But I didn’t know the village at all and had no time beforehand for any reconnaissance. All I had was a jeep and a driver. I had to go from house to house, ringing on doorbells. The homeowners were dismissive and unfriendly; the cattle farmers in particular were miserly and didn’t want to be disturbed, even though their farmyards would have been ideal for our needs. The freezing recruits sat in the troop carriers were growing inpatient; their drivers were waiting for my commands and instructions. So I issued my commands, but these just clearly confused them far more than they helped. What followed can best be described as chaos. Nobo...