By 1988, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) had achieved significant penetration of its primary market, clinical medicine. It had surpassed computed tomography (CT) scanners as the preferred diagnostic tool for a number of diseases, especially those affecting soft tissues of the head. A typical MRI machine for clinical application consists of a large, powerful, cylindrical magnet with a bore (aperture) large enough to enclose a human head or a reclining human body; a set of electrically conducting gradient coils that impose additional magnetic fields onto the object being imaged; a radiofrequency (RF) transmitter to excite nuclei in the object being imaged; an RF receiver to detect RF energy given off from nuclei as they return to their unexcited states; a computer to control the entire process, including the current fed to the gradient coils, the shape and timing of the RF excitation, and conversion of the pattern of RF energy received into a form that can be displayed as an image; and a display device such as a cathode-ray tube.
Government, Industry, University Roles and Relationships. For the first decade of its development, roughly 1971-1981, MRI research was led by academics, many based in the United Kingdom, who were either physicists interested in the imaging phenomenon itself or medical researchers interested in eventual application of the technology to clinical diagnostics. Initially publishing in physics journals, by the late 1970s, most of the British were publishing in radiology and instrumentation journals, driven by the prospect of the technology's application in clinical medicine. In the mid-1970s, only EMI pursued industrial development of MRI, but it did so substantially in isolation from other researchers. The British government was substantially involved in MRI development; British researchers received significant support from the Medical Research Council.
In the United States, Raymond Damadian, a medical researcher, sparked interest in applying nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques to medicine, while Paul Lauterbur, a chemist, initiated imaging itself and pursued improved images. Until well into the 1980s, both worked essentially alone, at least as far as colleagues in the U.S. were concerned. Damadian pursued commercialization of MRI on his own, while Lauterbur unsuccessfully tried to interest United States industry in its development. Once the potential for applying MRI to medicine became apparent to industry, largely because of the clinical trials being conducted in the United Kingdom with machines built by academics, industry rapidly took over the leading role and kept it through the end of the 1980s. Rapid commercial development and market leadership were achieved by large medical instrument firms, such as General Electric and Siemens, who used profits, technology, and market knowledge from related products to move quickly to the forefront. In most cases, companies took the lead in research underlying MRI rather than relying on collaborations with, or results generated by, universities. Some academic consultants were hired, but the primary industry-university linkages consisted of companies working with medical schools to conduct clinical trials of prototype machines.
Relationship between Fundamental Research and Technology Development. The fundamental elements of MRI are those of nuclear magnetic resonance, which rest directly on nuclear physics. NMR moved rapidly from fundamental research at Stanford to commercialization because of involvement by Russell Varian of Varian Associates; from that point, industry led the development. Richard Ernst, a Swiss physicist who later won the Nobel Prize for his NMR work, contributed initially to NMR while he worked at Varian. Fast Fourier transforms, developed by mathematicians at Bell Labs, and Ernst's 2D imaging technique based on pulsed Fourier transform procedures, speeded the development of MRI by reducing computing requirements. Once the phenomenon of nuclear resonance was understood, the development of both NMR and MRI depended more on technology than on research, although as commercial NMR matured in the mid-1980s, the focus of advances shifted more toward fundamental research. Through most of MRI's evolution, the challenges were to improve image quality and reduce scan times and computational requirements. Even during the early days of MRI, these challenges, rather than a desire to explore underlying processes, motivated the researchers-yet in many instances it was necessary to engage in just such explorations to improve image quality or reduce scan time.
Intellectual Property Rights. There is an extensive patent history associated with MRI, but there is no evidence that patenting slowed development of the innovation. The pioneers of MRI, academics in the United States and the United Kingdom, either recognized the potential value of their discoveries or hedged their bets by patenting. Lauterbur attempted unsuccessfully to patent his projection method. Damadian patented the FONAR technique. Hinshaw and Mansfield in the United Kingdom patented the point and slice methods of selective excitement, respectively. Ernst, after returning to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, patented his 2D technique and assigned the patent to Varian. Although researchers may have proceeded with prototype development before addressing the intellectual property question, most subsequently took out licenses or engaged in cross-licensing with other firms. GE and other companies all licensed the portfolio held by the British Technology Group. With some notable exceptions, such as GE's birdcage coil, market advantage was gained more through know-how and pricing than through intellectual property, since most companies were using the same basic technology.
NSF Role. Through awards for research and instrumentation
in nuclear magnetic resonance, NSF provided a significant part
of the infrastructure that several U.S. participants drew on in
the development of MRI. From 1955 to the present, NSF support
for NMR research underlying the entire innovation amounted to
$90 million.[2] This included support for instrumentation purchases
and the education of graduate students, some of whom would build
on their graduate research experiences in subsequent MRI work.
Additionally, NSF has supported research in related areas undergirding
the innovation itself, e.g., electromagnetics, digital systems,
and computer engineering. Beyond this, however, there is little
additional evidence of NSF's direct role in the development of
MRI, at least through the end of the 1980s.
The Internet can be characterized as a system that embodies the following technological components:
Government, Industry, University Roles and Relationships. The first "Internet" was the interconnection of dissimilar networks consisting of ARPANET, packet radio, and packet satellite under the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) sponsorship in 1977. This and the subsequent connection of ARPANET and networks supported by other federal agencies were entirely government owned and supported, with university researchers and contractors supplying hardware, software, and services. Within a decade, as a result of key decisions made primarily by NSF, a three-tiered system of internetworks existed, managed and supported by a mix of universities, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies, with portions operated by common carriers and commercial service providers. At present, the mix of operators remains, but the basic Internet backbone is owned and operated by commercial firms.
A significant aspect of this institutional evolution can be attributed to NSF's insistence that, whatever form the research-based network it originally envisioned might take, it should be accessible to supercomputer users and personal computer users alike; it should permit seamless interconnections among all major existing networks; and, to ensure its survival, it should eventually become self-supporting. These features meant choosing TCP/IP over other protocols, working out ways for commercial activities to be included on the Internet, and building bridges between NSF and other federal agencies so that all major government networks were included. None of these were easy or obvious decisions, and the ones involving commercial use of the Internet proved especially challenging.
In the mid- to late 1960s, before ARPANET's implementation, the issue of packet switching as a technology for data networks was debated during the Spring and Fall Joint Computer Conferences. The communications industry was skeptical. Since there was no industry leader, a dominant industry protocol did not emerge. In this sense, government-first DOD/ARPA and then NSF-played the role of key innovator in the evolution of the Internet. Agency leaders and program managers took technical and political risks, and the risk-taking seems to have paid off.
All three institutions-government, industry, and universities-played significant but different roles in the development of the Internet. To some extent, this extensive involvement of all three types of institutions can be attributed to an "invisible college" that transcended institutional sectors, a feature of many areas of U.S. science and engineering. The focus of technical and organizational innovation shifted from government to industry over a 30-year period, with universities playing a constant supportive role over the entire time. Interinstitutional linkages are reflected in a different way in memberships on the myriad advisory committees to the Internet over its history and in the coalitions that formed to provide network services. In many respects, the Internet's existence exemplifies the extraordinary (relative to most other industrialized nations) frequency and ease with which scientists and engineers in the United States move back and forth among government, industry, and university. It also illustrates how a government agency's leadership can build on this interinstitutional permeability to generate productive collaboration at the national level.
Relationships between Fundamental Research and Technology Development. The Internet appears, overall, to be primarily a problem-driven, technology-based innovation that required little direct input from fundamental research for its realization. The driving forces were not profit incentives in the private market, but public goods, first in the realm of national defense and subsequently in the university and government research infrastructure, as a means of fostering communication among computer scientists. The Internet's intrinsic technologies-network design, packet switching, routers, protocols, browsers-were the products of problem-driven research conducted in universities and government contractor laboratories with government support. One possible exception is the research conducted at the University of Illinois's National Center for Supercomputer Applications (an NSF facility), which took place in an environment that enabled researchers to head off in directions that looked "interesting" without seeking justification. Nonetheless, the context was one of application, as suggested by the Center's name.
Although the evolution of the Internet did not encounter technical roadblocks that required fundamental research for their resolution before further progress could be made, there is obvious, fundamental research content in both the Internet's intrinsic and supporting technologies. The electronic and physical infrastructures that comprise the Internet clearly depend on information theory, solid-state physics, electro-optics, and other fields on which modern communications technology is based and for which NSF has provided substantial research support.
Property Rights. An obvious feature of the Internet is its "ownerlessness." It is perhaps astonishing that an innovation that has proved to be of such tremendous economic significance and that has spawned numerous personal fortunes and substantial commercial profits is based almost entirely on nonproprietary technology. Yet the key technical innovations were developed with government support, and decisions to use nonproprietary technology were made whenever there was a choice. Another unusual feature of the Internet is that most browser and utility software, including Mosaic, Netscape, Fetch, Gopher, and others, was usually made available free on the World Wide Web. In contrast to many other types of innovations, diffusion of the Internet's intrinsic technologies was enhanced rather than inhibited by their public character. It was apparently an advantage, from a technology diffusion point of view, that the profitmaking aspects of the Internet were not realized until most of its present features were already in place. By about 1990, the public-goods nature of the Internet began to be intermingled, successfully, with commercial interests.
NSF Role. It is well documented that NSF program managers, working within the highly supportive environment provided-at least at the level of NSF top management-took risks, developed highly creative solutions to difficult problems, and provided essential services in coordinating among other federal agencies, academic researchers, and industry. A different set of decisions by NSF "would have led to a far different networking universe than the one we have today." NSF was a leader among equals in various coordinating committees, such as the Federal Networking Council, in which NSF is said to have played the dominant role.
The foundations of the Internet were laid by ARPA in the Department
of Defense. But by the mid-1980s, primary financial support of
the Internet had been assumed by NSF. NSF's support of education
and infrastructure, although more subtle and difficult to identify,
permeates the history of many of the key contributors. NSF also
provided a substantial amount of the university-based computing
infrastructure that NSFNET joined together. Between 1959 and
1971, NSF made more than 400 awards for computing facilities to
colleges and universities under the computer center facilities
program, totaling more than $60 million.[3] By the time the program
was terminated, most U.S. academic institutions had established
computing centers. ARPA support for computer science research
during this period dwarfed NSF's, but it was concentrated at a
small number of selected computer science departments. NSF support
of computing facilities, networks, and research in computer science
and engineering resumed again in the 1980s, resulting in five
supercomputer centers, CSNET and NSFNET, partial support for regional
networks, and substantial support for research and other infrastructure
elements. By the late 1980s, NSF support for computer and information
science and engineering amounted to well over $100 million annually.[4]