3:17pm Thursday 18th February 2010
By Nicola Lisle
Anyone who has benefited from the use of an MRI scanner to diagnose a medical condition will surely want to pay homage to the birthplace of this remarkable technology, which was launched 30 years ago.
Developed by Oxford Instruments at their former factory in Oxford’s Osney Mead Industrial Estate, the MRI scanner was first put to use in 1980, and is still regarded as the greatest breakthrough in medical diagnostics since the invention of the X-Ray machine 100 years earlier.
Although Oxford Instruments continues to be at the forefront of scientific development, the launch of the MRI scanner remains its most significant achievement, and followed two decades of extraordinary determination and endeavour.
The company was founded in 1959 by Martin Wood, an Oxfordshire man whose early encounters with injustices in the workplace helped shape his philosophy of encouraging teamwork, which he believed resulted in greater efficiency. In Magnetic Venture: The Story of Oxford Instruments, his wife Audrey writes that he quickly learnt “that treating employees as cogs in a machine, and failing to give encouragement and praise where they are due, stifle enthusiasm and creativity”.
This view was reinforced for Martin during the immediate post-war years when he worked in the South Wales mines as a ‘Bevin Boy’ — one of the 48,000 young men recruited by Labour Minister Ernest Bevin in response to a shortage of labour in the coal industry. A brief stint as a union representative, during which he led a ‘work-to-rule’ protest, left him firmly convinced that industry needed to be managed more efficiently.
He spent six years studying engineering at Cambridge and Imperial College, London, after which his conviction that he could improve industrial practices drew him back to the mining industry. But his optimism soon turned to disillusionment, and in 1955 his life took a different direction altogether, when he came to Oxford to work as a Senior Research Officer at the Clarendon Laboratory, under the guidance of Dr (later Professor) Nicholas Kurti.
Martin’s work involved conducting experiments to develop magnet technology – “Magnets, their design, construction and operation,” his wife wrote, became his “daily preoccupation”.
Although he found his work interesting, Wood’s fascination with industry, and his desire to improve industrial practices, refused to go away. His ambition was to harness his knowledge of magnets to his ideas for improved industrial efficiency, and out of this the idea for Oxford Instruments was born.
This was the university’s first spin-off company, and had the full backing of Nicholas Kurti and Professor Brebis Bleaney, Wood’s head of department.
Audrey Wood notes that, from the start, her husband had “a vision of what he wanted to achieve in the company, a flair for leadership and strategic thinking, and the ability to persuade people to his viewpoint”.
Initially, Wood was expected to continue working at the Clarendon Laboratory on a part-time basis, but his wife was able to help by taking on the company’s administration, finance, publicity and marketing. “Luckily I had already taught myself to type while tied to the house with a young baby,” she recalls in Magnetic Venture. “As we worked together, we found we had complementary abilities, the foundation for a lasting partnership.”
The fledgling company started by manufacturing copper-wound electro-magnets for a highly specialised market. Its first base was the Woods’ own home in Northmoor Road, where they quickly outgrew the study, spare room and former coal cellar, and established a workshop in their back garden.
Over the years the company has moved several times, its former homes including a disused stable and slaughter house in Summertown — which came complete with a collection of pre-war butchers’ bikes! — and, in 1965, an old boat-building shed at Osney Lock, which was later expanded into a purpose-built factory. It was here that the MRI scanner was born.
By 1980, Oxford Instruments had grown not only in size but in stature, establishing a reputation in the UK and beyond for its pioneering scientific developments. But it was the acquisition of Newport Instruments in 1974 that led to that all-important breakthrough. Newport Instruments specialised in products based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), and throughout the ‘70s the company worked on the idea of using NMR as a safer and more efficient method of body scanning than X-Ray machines. Soon NMR scanning “caught the imagination of the medical world and of the public” as Audrey Wood notes, and in 1980 Oxford Instruments supplied its first commercial whole-body superconducting magnets to Hammersmith Hospital and the Imaging Laboratory of the University of California.
Competitors were snapping at their heels, but Oxford Instruments’ greater experience in the technology of superconducting magnets established the company as a world leader in the field. Orders for the specialised magnets rocketed, and in 1983 Oxford Instruments was floated on the Stock Exchange to help secure the funds necessary to fully respond to this burgeoning market.
By this time the name of the scanner had been changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) due to public suspicion about anything with the word ‘nuclear’ in the name. Hospital staff had to be taught about the power of high magnetic fields, and Audrey Wood recalls how metal pens, keys and gas cylinders were grabbed by the scanners’ magnetic forces. Worse still, the magnetic strips on credit cards could be wiped clean if the unsuspecting cardholder passed too close to the machines.
The success of MRI inspired Oxford Instruments to expand into other areas of medical diagnostics, including foetal monitoring and the study of epilepsy and sleep disorders. Since then, the company has continued to expand, with bases being established in the US and Europe.
Martin Wood’s achievements were rewarded with a knighthood in June 1986, and the following year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Despite some difficult years, the company is thriving at its new base at Tubney Woods near Abingdon, and last year celebrated its 50th anniversary.
But its reputation still rests firmly on the role it played in the launch of the MRI scanner, which is now estimated to be used on 300,000 patients a day worldwide. The blue plaque was unveiled at the company’s former Osney Mead site (now The King’s Centre) in May 2007, and is a fitting tribute to the company of which Audrey Wood wrote: “Innovation is its lifeblood”.
Further reading: Magnetic Venture: The Story of Oxford Instruments by Audrey Wood (OUP, 2001)
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