YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Mansfield

lines on the record: 42
first: 2006-06-18
most recent: 2006-06-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think a photograph album of pictures of the family over the years would be very nice and be a constant reminder of some of the memorable occasions we've had.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this is Nimrod. It's from the enigma variations, but it's an enigmatic piece of music as far as I'm concerned, and I love it.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a family and I would miss seeing them. One needs one's family around one to keep things in perspective. I mean, if I were literally isolated, I don't know. I think I would be miserable. I need to have someone to talk to and someone to interact with.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a piece of music sung by a pericomo and this was around at about the time that my wife and I got married and this piece of music was given to me on a postcard by my wife. You could in those days buy what looked like an ordinary postcard and on one side it could be played on a gramophone and on the other side you'd write a message. And this is the piece of music that she gave me.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, she's certainly been very patient, I think, over the years and also very supportive over the years. We did go on a trip last summer actually. We went on a Mediterranean cruise, which was very pleasant. And we might be doing something similar again.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there was me initially concerned about getting a prize for work done in 1970 or in the early 70s. So I really felt very satisfied and I had no worries at all about it.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was obviously elated, very pleased. I did feel that it was a little bit late in the day, but when I eventually accepted and went to Sweden to the ceremony, the award ceremony, there were physicists there who got physics prize that year, and one of them was turned 80. And he got his Nobel Prize for work that he did in 1946.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, thing came really as a bolt from the blue because I really didn't think that a prize would be coming anyway. I thought it was really far too late.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now this is part of Purcell's Abdalazin, and it reminds me very much of the occasion in nineteen ninety three when I received a knighthood at Buckingham Palace. This piece of music was being played as background music and I enjoyed it very much.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the time position has already been solved. I mean, when we do imaging in Nottingham, our scan time is literally milliseconds, so we can get a complete image in a snapshot at how long it takes. But I think it takes a while for that type of imaging to eventually find its way into common use.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a question that my wife often puts to me, and my answer really is at the end of the day that you need a magnetic field which is large enough to cover the body, so it's never going to get that small. It might get shorter because if they're very long, then you get this sort of feeling of going into a tunnel, and that can be disconcerting. So some of the modern machines are actually much shorter than the original machines.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I don't personally like to think of it quite like that, and I don't honestly believe that one will necessarily ever be able to determine exactly what one is thinking.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I felt quite proud. And it can and does bring many, many people peace of mind. I think there's nothing worse to be left in suspense not knowing. And I think the scannerers helped in that sense that many, many people feel that they now know and they need to know.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the Nobel Prize was announced, I had quite a lot of mail, I mean one could say fan mail, I suppose people writing to me and telling me of their personal experiences having been scanned and in many cases the benefit that they received by having a scan.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This piece is from the suite of Smetina called Maflust. Maflust of course is my country and this is the piece called the Valtava or D Moldal which is the name of the river that runs through Czechoslovakia. When I was living in Germany we made a trip by car from Heidelberg to Poland and we passed through Czechoslovakia and we went over this gorge and the sign said Altava and we stopped in Prague and I found a shop there and bought the piece of music.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, I remember particularly when we produced the very first movie images showing cardiac motion in a rabbit. We actually had a live rabbit in the machine and we could see its thorax and see the heart beating in real time and that was obviously quite exciting and it gave all of us I think great pleasure to be able to go to a conference in America and present this for the very first time. I think it was exciting for us but I think it was stunning for other people to see it.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was, but he was interested in my approach to imaging, but he didn't actually use our approach at all. He carried on with his own approach. So he had his way of doing imaging, and we had our way of doing imaging. And we more or less kept it separate.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be honest, we did it simultaneously within a few months of each other, and he approached the whole problem from a slightly different perspective”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The spins, which are the nuclear spins, line up in the magnetic field, and then in order to observe those you then have to put a radio frequency pulse in to kick them over through roughly ninety degrees so that they then start to process”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is, yes, the body contains something like seventy percent water, which is free, and it's that free water and more tightly bound water in the molecular structures of cells and so on that one can actually see.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a piece of German folk music sung by a Schlaginger called Heino and is called Fombereter Schwank Di Feder and this reminds me very much of my sabbatical year spent in Heidelberg.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go down the butchers. Well, chicken legs and things of that sort. Well, that was a bit too big because in those days the sample size was about one and a half centimeters, and so when we ran out of the obvious materials to put in the machine, I had the idea that perhaps, you know, if one of us put our finger in the machine, we could get an image of our finger, and we all tried poking our finger in, but the guy that had the thinnest finger was one of my students called Andrew Maudsley. And that was really the turning point, I think, in our approach to the whole thing.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's difficult, and I do believe very much that I still have things to do. One of the problems that I'm working on at the moment is to try to reduce the acoustic noise in scanners.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this piece is called Crown Imperial, and it was written by William Walton. I heard this many, many years ago and found it to be a very stirring and inspiring piece”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Magnetic risk. We're on the trail, as it were. Yeah, magnetic resonance, but at 2 kilohertz. So rather than see the image on a screen, you listen to it and you heard the signal. It was a sort of pinging noise. And depending on how sharp it was or how long the ping was, it was either bing bing or it was a longer ping, so it went bing and the difference between the very short ping and the long note denoted that there was something present near the probe which was upsetting the Earth's magnetic field.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was asked to do this by my supervisor. He wanted me to build a machine that operated using transistors so it would be portable. So I built this piece of equipment and it worked and I tried it and was able to pick up signals. These are all at very low frequencies so I actually had a pair of headphones and could hear the signal.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, they said though that if you take this job you must get your O levels, and I was already studying for O levels anyway. So no problem.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had this experience our family used to take the Daily Mirror, and one day I read in this paper that there was a place called the Rocket Propulsion Department at Westcott, and there was a piece about a young lad who'd come from grammar school and had been accepted to work at the Rocket Propulsion Department. I wrote to the editor of the Daily Mirror, and I got a reply to the effect that I should contact the Ministry of Supply. And they said, if you would like to work at the Rocket Propulsion Department, we must organise an interview for you at Westcott. I went along for interview and was accepted without qualification.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that was quite a struggle, but I did it. And of course, doing that, I had no time to do anything else because I was at six o'clock every night till nine o'clock improving my languages and so on.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was a teacher, a science teacher, and I do recall as I approached the age of fifteen, talking to him about ways in which I could continue in education, but it would have been extremely difficult because I would have been the only person in the school that stayed on.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a piece by Charles Tranet called Lamer, and this piece I heard for the first time when I was fifteen had left school and went to live in France for one month, and this particular piece of music figured very much in my mind at the time, and I've enjoyed it ever since”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If anything, I think I was really regarded as a bit of a destructive kid, you know, because I had the screwdriver out as soon as I could and wanted to know what was inside.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was always interested in how things worked. I remember being told off many times for unscrewing the back of certain objects, particularly clocks and”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was very impressed towards the end of the war with the way things were going with so-called doodlebugs V-1 weapons. I was actually in London when the first Doodlebugs came over and I remember one evening being woken up it must have been ten or eleven o'clock at night and my father came galloping into the room and he said Have a look out the window and my mother and my father and I we rushed to the window and saw what looked like an aeroplane which was on fire, but my father said no it's not on fire it's something different you know he didn't know what it was none of us did it turned out to be a V one Doodleburg.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was asked as other children were towards the end of my school period when I was approaching fifteen. What I wanted to do, and I distinctly remember saying well, I'm quite interested in science, and I wouldn't mind being a scientist. And when he finished laughing, he said, well, now let's be sensible. Let's talk about what you really can do. You have no qualifications, and what other things, apart from science, are you interested in? I said, well, I have a hobby, I do printing, I actually built a printing machine at home, and I used to produce a sort of comic kid's comic. So he said, well, I will try and fix you up with a job, which he eventually did, and that job was bookbinding.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in those early days quite interested in space travel and so on, and I suppose it did have some effect when I first heard this. I found it very moving and uplifting.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were not particularly good or clear by today's standards, but at the time they were the only picture, so I was able to show that you could get an image of a live person, and that was the best that we could do at the time.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's true My wife and some of my colleagues fiance were there to drag me out if there was any problem but fortunately there wasn't.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well it was, I was fairly sure that it wouldn't cause any problem, but on the other hand, the machine that we had created at that time was completely enclosed in an aluminium box for magnetic and electromagnetic screening, and as a result of this I was in complete darkness, pitch black inside. So it was a combination of being tightly enclosed. It got very warm in there because the magnet wasn't cooled properly.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we were switching magnetic field gradients on and off, there was a small chance that one could interfere with the cardiac function.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was fairly convinced that there wasn't going to be a problem despite the fact that I'd had a letter from an American colleague saying that the general setup that we had might be dangerous because he'd done some calculations to suggest that we could end up in difficulties.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, yes, the very first experiments were done with me climbing in the magnet and producing a by today standards very crude scan of my abdomen.”
2006-06-18 · Desert Island Discs · Peter Mansfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source