Allan McLeod Cormack

South African physicist (1924–)

Born in Johannesburg in South Africa, Cormack was educated at the University of Cape Town. He became interested in x-ray imaging at the Groote Schuur Hospital in Johannesburg, where he worked as a physicist in the radioisotopes department. In 1956 he moved to America where he served as professor at Tufts University, Massachusetts, until his retirement in 1994.

Cormack was the first to analyze theoretically the possibilities of developing a radiological cross-section of a biological system. Independently of the British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield, he developed the mathematical basis for the technique of computer-assisted x-ray tomography (CAT), describing this in two papers in 1963 and 1964, and provided the first practical demonstration. X-ray tomography is a process by which a picture of an imaginary slice through an object (or the human body) is built up from information from detectors rotating around the body. The application of this technique to medical x-ray imaging was to lead to diagnostic machines that could provide very accurate pictures of tissue distribution in the human brain and body. Hounsfield was unaware of the work of Cormack when he developed the first commercially successful CAT scanners for EMI in England.

Cormack also pointed out that the reconstruction technique might equally be applied to proton tomography, or to gamma radiation from positron annihilations within a patient, and he is investigating these as possible imaging techniques.

Cormack shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Hounsfield for the development of CAT.

Allan MacLeod Cormack
Born	February 23, 1924 Johannesburg, Gauteng
Died	May 07, 1998 Massachusetts
Nationality	United States
Fields	Physicist
Known for	Computed tomography
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1979

Allan MacLeod Cormack (February 23, 1924 – May 7, 1998) was a South African-born American physicist who won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Godfrey Hounsfield) for his work on x-ray computed tomography (CT).

Cormack was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He attended the Rondebosch Boys' High School in Cape Town, where he was active in the debating and tennis teams. He received his B.Sc. in physics in 1944 from the University of Cape Town and his M.Sc. in crystallography in 1945 from the same institution. He was a research student at Cambridge University from 1947-49, and while at Cambridge he met his future wife, Barbara Seavey, an American physics student.

After marrying Seavey, he returned to the University of Cape Town in early 1950 to lecture. Following a sabbatical at Harvard in 1956-57, the couple agreed to move to the United States, and Cormack became a professor at Tufts University in the fall of 1957. Cormack became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1966. Although he was mainly working on particle physics, Cormack's side interest in x-ray technology led him to develop the theoretical underpinnings of CT scanning. This work was initiated at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital in early 1956 and continued briefly in mid-1957 after returning from his sabbatical. His results were subsequently published in two papers in the Journal of Applied Physics in 1963 and 1964. These papers generated little interest until Hounsfield and colleagues built the first CT scanner in 1971, taking Cormack's theoretical calculations into a real application. For their independent efforts, Cormack and Hounsfield shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was member of the International Academy of Science.

Cormack died of cancer in Massachusetts at age 74. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Mapungubwe on the 10 December 2002 for outstanding achievements as a scientist and for co-inventing the CT scanner.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Allan McLeod Cormack

• Nobel Prize Biography
• Imagining the Elephant (Allan Cormack Biography) by CL Vaughan

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine Baruch Blumberg / Daniel Gajdusek (1976) · Roger Guillemin / Andrew Schally / Rosalyn Yalow (1977) · Werner Arber / Daniel Nathans / Hamilton O. Smith (1978) · Allan Cormack / Godfrey Hounsfield (1979) · Baruj Benacerraf / Jean Dausset / George Snell (1980) · Roger Sperry / David H. Hubel / Torsten Wiesel (1981) · Sune Bergström / Bengt I. Samuelsson / John Vane (1982) · Barbara McClintock (1983) · Niels Jerne / Georges Köhler / César Milstein (1984) · Michael Brown / Joseph L. Goldstein (1985) · Stanley Cohen / Rita Levi-Montalcini (1986) · Susumu Tonegawa (1987) · James W. Black / Gertrude B. Elion / George H. Hitchings (1988) · J. Michael Bishop / Harold E. Varmus (1989) · Joseph Murray / E. Donnall Thomas (1990) · Erwin Neher / Bert Sakmann (1991) · Edmond Fischer / Edwin G. Krebs (1992) · Richard J. Roberts / Phillip Sharp (1993) · Alfred G. Gilman / Martin Rodbell (1994) · Edward B. Lewis / Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard / Eric F. Wieschaus (1995) · Peter C. Doherty / Rolf M. Zinkernagel (1996) · Stanley B. Prusiner (1997) · Robert F. Furchgott / Louis Ignarro / Ferid Murad (1998) · Günter Blobel (1999) · Arvid Carlsson / Paul Greengard / Eric Kandel (2000) Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present

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