As a writer with the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), I have had several opportunities to explore the history of radiology at the hospital: from the early days of the X ray to the introduction of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and beyond. Of my various history projects, one of my favorites is a book marking the 20th anniversary of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, a research center straddling MGH and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—not least because it gave birth to the work you are currently reading.
Researchers in the Martinos Center develop and apply a host of biomedical imaging technologies, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and more. As it happened, at the time I was preparing the book, the center’s MEG staff included David Cohen, the father of the field of biomagnetism and the inventor of MEG.
One day as I was writing, I reached out to David with questions about some of his recent work. We got to talking and I found myself wanting to know more: more about what he had achieved in his career, what had inspired him to achieve it, and what circumstances had led him to a place where he not only came up with his transformative ideas about measuring the weak magnetic signals emanating from the human body, but was also in a position where he could successfully put them into practice. Eventually, after further conversations, I proposed telling his story, from childhood to the introduction of the MEG technology that made the field of biomagnetism possible.
David and I debated the merits of my proposal. At 97 years old at the time of this writing, and with a lifetime of accomplishments to his name, he is still a modest guy. He argued that no one would want to hear his story. And even if they did, he said, telling it in the way I had proposed would give the appearance of him having an outsized opinion of himself.
I felt, and still feel, that the story deserves to be told, not least because it is more than the story of one (modest) man. It is also the story of an idea, and how that idea worked its way into scientific practice. And more broadly, it is the story of the challenges a scientist may face in navigating a convoluted funding landscape and often-thorny academic politics—even while negotiating a personal life and, more than likely, complicated family dynamics. I have never met a scientist who cannot relate to at least one of these.
So here it is. Thank you, David, for sharing your story. And thank you, reader, for joining us. I hope you find in the story the same inspiration that I have.
Gary Boas, March 2025
In the image above: the author, roped into modeling the Martinos Center’s MEG scanner during a 2019 photo shoot.
