Wüthrich, Kurt. “Richard R. Ernst (1933–2021) – A Life of NMR, Classical Music and Tibetan Art.” Journal of Magnetic Resonance 331 (October 2021): 107047.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmr.2021.107047.
With the passing of Richard R. Ernst, the 1991 chemistry Nobel laureate, the NMR community mourns a great scientist and friend, who used the NMR phenomenon as a source for developing methods of daily use in all branches of chemistry, in structural biology, and in medical diagnosis. His invention, jointly with Dr. Weston A. Anderson, of Fourier transform NMR (FT-NMR) in the 1960s was the basis for the introduction of multi-dimensional NMR spectroscopy to chemistry and structural biology in the 1970s and 1980s, and related mathematical treatments of NMR data paved the way for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to be widely used in medical diagnosis and in materials research. Readers of the Journal of Magnetic Resonance are daily in touch with Richard Ernst’s legacy. The more junior scientists among us may, however, be less well informed either about the circumstances under which Ernst pursued his seminal work, or about Richard Ernst as a private person. This article starts with a sketch of the NMR field at the time when Richard Ernst was a graduate student at the ETH Zürich in Switzerland and then a research scientist at the Varian Company in Palo Alto in California, USA