Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI scanning, is a diagnostic technique that is now familiar to almost anyone who has had a bad back, a damaged knee or a suspected stroke.
During the 1970s and 80s the Oxford biochemist Sir George Radda, who has died aged 88, worked with the same underlying physics to generate not an image, but a spectrum that revealed the biochemical state of the muscles and organs. For the first time it was possible to diagnose metabolic diseases without invasive tissue sampling.
