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| The Varian Story |
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Agilent Technologies abruptly shut down the Varian NMR business in
October 2014, causing anger and resentment among large sections of the
NMR community. Lucio Frydman, editor of the Journal of Magnetic
Resonance, asked Ray Freeman and Gareth Morris to coauthor a Perspective
on the 60-year history of that famous company. This article appeared
on-line on 19 December 2014 and in print in J. Magn. Reson. 250,
80-84 (2015). It represents a very personal account of the growth,
evolution and eventual demise of Varian NMR. The principal points are
set out in four main sections, named after the four seasons. How well
did management handle an unconventional group of young scientific
entrepreneurs? How did accepted business practices result in the
downfall of this courageous enterprise? How can a management
misjudgment have such catastrophic consequences? What does it all mean
for the future of magnetic resonance?
"SPRINGTIME"
The beginning. Russell and Sigurd Varian had a profitable business manufacturing microwave devices, based on the invention of the klystron (1).
Russell then looked around for a fresh scientific challenge. He
specifically ruled out any profitable commercial venture, but sought
something more akin to a hobby (we can now appreciate the unintended
irony). Intrigued by the pioneering work of Felix Bloch and Ed Purcell,
he chose to explore the new field of magnetic resonance. It fitted
neatly with his expertise in radiofrequency electronics, and his
continued interest in the related topic of radar.
This offered a fairy tale beginning for a handful of scientists from
Stanford University. By a stroke of good fortune they had completed
their doctoral work with Felix Bloch in a field of research that was
entirely new, unproven, and which seemed to have no limits. Jim Arnold
built the original "high-resolution" permanent magnet. Unfortunately it
was not something that could easily be replicated, because it required
most of the power supply of Stanford University to energize it. This was
the first time that anyone had even attempted to generate a magnetic
field with such a fantastically high degree of spatial uniformity.
Someone remarked that the resolving power, one part in 60,000,000, could
be likened to that of an optical telescope capable of resolving "images
of two cats sitting side-by-side on the moon".
Martin Packard, Jim Arnold and Wes Anderson then recorded the very first
high-resolution NMR spectra in the world. This small core of
enthusiasts banded together to form an instrument section within the
main Varian operation, comfortably protected from mundane concerns about
funding. To these courageous innovators we owe the genesis of Varian
NMR. They had the foresight and courage to take the raw experiments
performed at Stanford and construct something solid and practical that
could be offered for sale. They appeared to be thinking "NMR is an
exciting invention, so let's make it possible for others to use it too".
Profit seemed to be only a secondary consideration. Thanks to Sputnik,
the scientific climate at that time was one of boundless optimism.
The age of innocence. Conventional "Master of Business
Administration (MBA)" wisdom would have insisted that the new group
should concentrate exclusively on design and construction of the first
commercial NMR spectrometer, thus ensuring continued viability for the
venture. But the fledgling Varian scientists enjoyed a remarkable
freedom to be flexible in their choice of project. Unstructured "blue
sky" research is fun, although mostly restricted to a lucky few. They decided to develop Russell Varian's idea for an Earth's field magnetometer (2),
using free precession of proton spins in a water sample. Once the
device had been built and tested, the question "What shall we use it
for?" produced two diametrically opposed answers, and it throws an
interesting light on the question of motivation. The first application
was to develop a "magnetic anomaly detector" that could search for
submarines in the magnetically quiet environment of the oceans. At the
other extreme, Varian scientists working in Switzerland noted that snow
was also a magnetically quiet medium, and they embarked on a project
verging on pure philanthropy. Avalanches kill dozens of skiers in the
Alps every year. Some victims are trapped under the snow but can still
breathe, and are not seriously injured. The standard search and rescue
operation involves a combination of trained sniffer dogs and a line of
human volunteers to probe the snow with long poles. The Varian idea was
to exploit their new magnetometer. Although the magnetism of skis can be
detected, skis are often thrown far from the victim, so the proposal
was to embed small magnets in the ski boots, and install a Varian
magnetometer at each ski station. Unfortunately, young skiers, convinced
of their immortality, are reluctant to pay for modified ski boots, and
the Varian initiative failed. But it does say a great deal about
motivation.
Flowering. By now a critical mass of remarkably talented people
had been assembled at Varian, made up of specialists in NMR, EPR, and
magnet engineering, and supported by a dedicated "applications
laboratory" that set out the stall for potential customers. To some
extent the new group behaved more like a university research department
than a commercial enterprise. Often scientists from abroad, having seen a
flurry of publications on magnetic resonance from an address in Palo
Alto, assumed that this must be one of the many California universities.
A post-doctoral program sprang up, attracting some top European
candidates. Management adopted a relaxed, visionary approach. In the
early 1960s the entire reporting hierarchy was made up of physicists all
the way to the top; not an MBA in sight. Flexibility was the order of
the day, offering the freedom to explore new avenues of magnetic
resonance that had no obvious direct impact on sales, but nevertheless
kept Varian NMR in the spotlight. For example, what seemed at the time
to be just a curiosity-driven study of double resonance techniques
eventually led to an important general method for internal
field/frequency lock derived from a proton or deuterium signal.
Spreading the word. The very first Varian NMR machines had
low-resolution magnets and were largely acquired to explore the broad
resonances of nuclei other than protons, or to venture into electron
spin resonance studies. But a few imaginative chemists saw that proton
NMR could be a powerful tool for determining molecular structure, and
this swiftly shifted the focus towards high resolution NMR. Even
established infrared spectroscopists now grudgingly admitted that NMR
might one day become important. Early enthusiasts had to build their own
spectrometers from scratch, not a simple undertaking in a department
concerned primarily with wet chemistry. By offering a commercial
machine, Varian now provided a significantly faster access to this
exciting new field. This was the beginning of what later became a
veritable revolution in structural chemistry. It was strongly encouraged
by Jim Shoolery, who began a Varian campaign to popularize the new
chemical applications by publishing regular bulletins called "This is NMR at Work"
and by organizing "workshops" to demonstrate this arcane branch of
physics to bewildered chemists. It is interesting to note that these
teaching sessions deliberately by-passed the rigorous formalism of NMR
in favor of a strictly pragmatic understanding of how it impacted on the
determination of molecular structure - an unashamedly practical
perspective that lives on among chemists to this day.
An NMR icon. A high-resolution spectrometer of that era was
heavy, cumbersome, not an easy beast to operate, and prohibitively
expensive for a typical chemistry laboratory budget. Purchase of a
spectrometer often involved the appointment of an expert in magnetic
resonance to run the machine. Even then, much time could be expended on
"in-house" modifications to improve the temperature stability of the
magnet and its cooling water. This was all changed by a stroke of genius
- the concept of a "user-friendly" spectrometer, aimed specifically at
the organic chemist. The NMR machine was completely redesigned, stripped
down in size, and reduced to the bare essentials. Introduced in 1961,
it was called the "A60" (3). It was compact, much
lighter than earlier machines, and seemed far more at home in a typical
chemistry laboratory. It came as a complete surprise to the magnetic
resonance community.
Organic chemists, often little concerned with pure physics, naturally
found the mystique of magnetic resonance difficult to master, but the
A60 was specifically conceived to make everything as simple and
intuitive as possible, with only the absolute minimum of operating
controls. Of these, only field homogeneity optimization (
"shimming") required any real skill, and even today this is still a
necessary chore. The most important innovation of all stemmed from Wes
Anderson's invention of the "nuclear sideband oscillator" (4)
that held the ratio of field and NMR frequency essentially constant. A
flatbed recorder was introduced for the first time, with the scan
through the spectrum synchronized with the movement of the pen. This
permitted precalibrated charts to be employed, allowing the chemist to
associate a particular chemical grouping with a specific location on the
chart. This can be thought of as a subliminal teaching aid - a direct
visual representation of the concept of "up-field" or "down-field"
chemical shifts. The A60 vastly broadened the general acceptance of
high-resolution spectroscopy and brought NMR within the reach of
hundreds of eager organic chemists. It enjoyed a surprisingly long life,
exemplified by the fact that Paul Lauterbur's historic magnetic
resonance imaging experiment (5) in 1973 was carried out on an A60.
"SUMMERTIME"
The golden age. It would have been wrong to say at this stage,
"and the living is easy". Nevertheless Varian NMR had settled into a
less hectic regime, represented by the steady progression from 30 MHz,
40 MHz, 60 MHz, to 100 MHz spectrometers, wider chemical shift
dispersion, higher sensitivity, double resonance, and field/frequency
lock. The wild exuberance of springtime was now tempered by a fresh
exhortation: "The Virginia City Days are Over", an allusion to
the onset of the California gold rush, when it was claimed that you
could stumble over a gold nugget while strolling down main street.
Those heady days were long gone, yet there were still some precious NMR
nuggets to be discovered, with the important difference that now the
search required a great deal of hard work. Two remarkable innovations
stand out as prime examples.
The Fourier spectrometer. This may not be generally appreciated,
but the seed of the Fourier transform revolution had been firmly
planted by Russell Varian in a patent filed in 1956 (6). The concept
was based on wide-band noise irradiation, but it was later realized that
excitation by intense radiofrequency pulses was a better alternative.
It was immediately accepted that at that time the conversion of a
transient time-domain signal into a frequency-domain spectrum presented
enormous practical difficulties. The digital computers then available
were essentially mechanical adding machines not so far removed from the
one invented by Charles Babbage. Extraction of the individual NMR
frequencies had to rely on analog Fourier analysis, akin to the
procedure used in a spectrum analyzer. Russell Varian proposed
recording the free induction signal on audio-frequency magnetic tape,
making a closed loop of the tape, and repeatedly scanning it to pick out
the desired "resonances" one at a time. The idea was too far ahead of
its time to allow any meaningful reduction to practice.
"A plurality of frequencies" (6). Almost a
decade later, Wes Anderson was exploring an alternative concept for
boosting sensitivity by multichannel excitation of the high-resolution
spectrum using a comb of modulation sidebands, generated by an
imaginative new mechanical device related to the prayer wheels favored
by Buddhist monks. This project was abandoned once it was realized that
Russell Varian's revolutionary Fourier transform concept might now be a
realistic proposition (7), even allowing for the
fact that the transformation stage would have to rely on a mainframe IBM
computer that could only be used at night when the essential Varian
management and accounting calculations had been completed. After much
diligent work, Richard Ernst and Wes Anderson were able to show that a
working prototype Fourier spectrometer could nevertheless be built, and
it offered an order of magnitude improvement in sensitivity (8).
However it remained only a "proof of principle"; a truly practical
commercial model was still far into the future. Certainly this seminal
paper was so far ahead of its time that even the referees completely
failed to appreciate its significance and originality, and twice
rejected the manuscript.
In retrospect it is easy to overlook the fact that the Ernst and
Anderson initiative was not yet a practical alternative to existing
high-resolution spectrometers employing the conventional sweep method.
Digitization of the free induction signal was a slow and cumbersome
procedure, dedicated laboratory minicomputers were not available, and
the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm (9)
had yet to be introduced. Then, suddenly, the Varian Fourier transform
project lost its champion when Richard Ernst left the company and
returned to academia in his native Switzerland. The torch was passed to a
small Varian research group that set out to modify an HA60 spectrometer
for FT-NMR, this time incorporating a laboratory minicomputer for the
Fourier transformation. It featured an innovative field/frequency
regulation scheme in which the tetramethylsilane signal was repeatedly
excited in the pulse mode, even when the full proton spectrum was not
being acquired. Unfortunately, without the Cooley-Tukey algorithm,
transformation of a typical 1K data set required 20 minutes. A few
potential customers were shown this prototype, but no sales were made. A
busy chemist was not prepared to wait through a suspiciously long
coffee break to see the first spectrum. A commercial Fourier
spectrometer was not top of the agenda.
Market research had indicated that potential NMR customers were dreaming
of a brand-new spectrometer that could, at the touch of a switch,
investigate any magnetic nucleus in the entire periodic table, with
decoupling as standard, and with built-in field/frequency lock. It was
decided to design and build a machine with "all the bells and whistles" -
the XL-100. This vast engineering enterprise monopolized resources and
required years to complete. The resulting "all-encompassing" machine
became the flagship of the Varian NMR fleet. Chemists showed little
interest in a putative Fourier transform project that appeared
cumbersome and dangerously high-risk. This opened the door for the
Bruker company to exploit the Ernst and Anderson initiative, and build a
Fourier transform spectrometer, thereby stealing a march on Varian. Too
much reliance on the customers' wish list, and not enough real vision?
Most chemists were still busy reveling in the seemingly unlimited
possibilities of the existing high-resolution spectrometers, so why
bother with such an eccentric innovation? Yet within a few years,
Fourier transform spectrometers had completely replaced the
old-fashioned idea of slow-passage frequency sweep spectroscopy.
Superconducting magnets. Varian can hardly be accused of
complacency with the achievements at that time. It was well understood
that more intense magnetic fields offered wider chemical shift
dispersion and enhanced NMR sensitivity, but the practical upper limit
for the field of an iron-cored magnet corresponded to a proton frequency
of 100 MHz. Harry Weaver had designed the suite of Varian
electromagnets. He could have been forgiven for resting on his laurels,
but instead he took on the daunting challenge of developing a completely
new form of magnet - a solenoid of superconducting wire held at the
temperature of liquid helium (10). Would the magnet
be persistent, or would there be a slow degradation of field intensity
with time? Was there a danger that the magnet could suddenly quench?
Could acceptably high field homogeneity be achieved? It is easy to
imagine all the practical challenges to be overcome, not least mastering
the arcane technology for making superconducting joints. In these
early magnets the Dewar vessel was not particularly efficient, and
helium boiled away quite rapidly, necessitating a refill every morning;
there were no holidays or extended vacations for the unlucky person in
charge. Just as in the prototype Fourier transform project,
superconducting solenoids were not going to make life easy for the
operator. On the other hand, it turned out that they benefitted from an
important practical advantage - in the persistent mode the total
magnetic flux was essentially constant, offering a welcome increase in
field stability. The initial goal was to build a 250 MHz spectrometer,
later moderated to 220 MHz for the first machine delivered. This
tentative proof of principle eventually led to today's essentially
global acceptance of superconducting NMR spectrometers. An invaluable
example of the Varian legacy.
User-friendly superconducting spectrometers. Later, in an
initiative reminiscent of the iconic A60 project, a completely new
superconducting spectrometer was designed, with help from an expert on
cryogenics from Stanford. The new magnet was physically much smaller,
and was housed in a rounded enclosure to minimize helium loss; it bore
an uncanny resemblance to the character R2D2 in Star Wars. This solved
the helium problem once and for all. The operator could now direct his
full attention to important matters of NMR spectroscopy, relegating the
magnet to the role of an innocuous bystander. This great leap in
spectrometer design (the XL-200) encouraged the general acceptance of
superconducting magnets, just as the A60 had popularized NMR in
chemistry.
Another new feature of the XL-200 was to have profound consequences.
Reprogramming earlier instruments to perform new experiments had
required changes to the instrument software at the machine code level,
deterring all but the foolhardy. In the XL-200, pulse programming was
carried out using the high level language PASCAL and for the first time
it became possible for ordinary users to try out new pulse sequences.
The result of this democratization was a blossoming of pulse sequence
development that bore fruit in many of the experimental methods in
common use today.
Governance. Unfortunately it was not long before the heavy hand
of management made a catastrophic decision. As it happened, two
European scientists were visiting Varian at the time in the guise of
outside consultants. Both were absolutely horrified by the simplistic
"logic" of the latest managerial diktat.
(1) Very high-field NMR is not profitable.
(2) We do not want to be in an unprofitable business.
(3) Discontinue all work on high-field magnets.
No one seemed to imagine any possible flaw in this reasoning. Had the
same managers been in charge in the early days of Varian, nothing would
ever have been ventured. Needless to say, the entreaties of the two
European academics fell on deaf ears, and Varian abruptly abandoned all
development of NMR spectrometers at frequencies higher than 200 MHz.
When, much later, this disastrous edict was eventually overturned,
Varian had lost the initiative and was forced to procure the necessary
high-field superconducting magnets from an outside enterprise, Oxford
Instruments. The competitive advantage had been sacrificed, with
regrettable long-term consequences. One wonders what Harry Weaver
thought of it all.
The loose gossip around Palo Alto sometimes tended to dismiss Varian as a
group of competent engineers without any managers. This was certainly
not the case in the golden years; there was a firm hand on the tiller,
belonging to physicist Ed Ginzton who clearly understood that Varian was
a very special enterprise requiring an enlightened approach to
management. The first C.E.O. was Merle Stearns who came from the
klystron facility on Long Island and provided funds to support the new
NMR venture. It was only very much later that governance became more
"rationalized" - that is to say, dictated principally by short-term
profitability. There was a fairly regular replacement of middle
management. It could be argued that the root problem lay in the very
nature of the conventional business model, because it seems
fundamentally unsuited to this type of imaginative enterprise. A young
MBA, suddenly placed in charge of a high technology group, understood
perfectly well that there was only a year or two to "turn things around"
so naturally concentrated on short-term planning, with scant attention
to the long-term future. It is also possible that a newcomer, trained
purely in business doctrine, was not really comfortable dealing with
unruly and insubordinate staff, armed with their superior knowledge of
magnetic resonance. This kind of friction affected company harmony, and a
few top scientists drifted away, or were even "eased out" by the
management. Like an inherently unstable heavy isotope, perhaps a nucleus
made up of too many prima donnas is doomed to eventual disintegration?
"AUTUMN"
By now the Varian company as a whole had split off the NMR business and
renamed it Varian, Inc. For simplicity in this Perspective it will still
be referred to as "Varian".
In the now mature NMR business, the early easy-going environment of
Varian's golden age was no longer acceptable. Emphasis was placed on
growth, market share, and the bottom line. In this phase of the story,
initiatives from outside Varian - solid-state NMR, biochemical
applications, cryogenically cooled probes, and multi-dimensional
spectroscopy - increasingly contributed to the continued expansion of
the subject. Magnetic resonance was now a thriving science in its own
right, and the initiative had started to pass from the manufacturer to
the customer - "users" were becoming innovators.
Competition. Innovation alone does not guarantee commercial
success. Other technology companies had ventured into the NMR business.
By far the most important of these was the Bruker organization, but it
was quite a while before Varian began to pay serious attention to the
danger posed by this private instrument company, then principally owned
by the Laukien family. Managed largely by scientists, it benefitted
from much more operational freedom, and was not under pressure from
shareholders. Furthermore, Varian was seriously constrained by its
practice of preparing detailed documentation for the manufacturing
process - hundreds of blueprints for any particular model of NMR
spectrometer. This was the norm for any mass-production operation,
because it allowed the factory to employ less-skilled personnel, and it
supplied exact detailed descriptions for servicing the equipment. But in
practice NMR spectrometers were manufactured one at a time; this was
not actual mass production. Bruker managed to operate with far simpler
documentation that could be modified for each new spectrometer, offering
each client an essentially custom-built machine. This more flexible
regime employed skilled science graduates who could make any desired
modifications on the factory floor. It was less expensive, more
efficient, and it permitted progressive improvements to be introduced in
a gradual manner. The saving grace of Varian's detailed documentation
was that it made their spectrometers ideal for researchers working on
NMR methodology, allowing them to adapt instruments in ways undreamt of
by their designers. This new pastime became known as "spin gymnastics"
or "spin choreography".
Growth. Imagine a small family company selling mousetraps.
Sales are perfectly stable, year-on-year, and the owners are quite
content to continue in this comfortable steady-state regime. But
business dogma insists that this is not an option; growth is absolutely
mandatory. Varian was no exception. How did the fledgling NMR business
evolve during the next stage, after the turbulence of the initial
start-up? Business analysts like to represent growth by a rising
exponential curve, tacitly disregarding the inherent limits of this
assumption. The problem lies in any attempt to extrapolate. Whatever
the exponent, fast or slow, a growth curve of this kind cannot continue
to increase indefinitely. [In the 1960s someone remarked that the
number of new PhD students joining IBM was rising exponentially, and
calculated the date at which all new PhDs in America would be swallowed up by IBM.]
Common sense tells us that growth must inevitably slow, and the graph
will gradually change into something closer to the shape of a sigmoid
curve, possibly reaching a plateau or (horror of horrors) a downward
trajectory. How does management react, knowing that the perception of
growth is essential? For the market in question, there is a limit
imposed by the total number of NMR spectroscopists in the world, so
there was little point in putting all the blame on the sales department.
The decision was made to broaden the scope of Varian, Inc, either by
acquiring related companies (gas chromatography, mass spectrometers) or
by investing in the development of new forms of spectroscopy
(ion-cyclotron resonance). Perhaps the most ill-fated Varian venture at
that time was a project to build a suite of low-cost "table-top" NMR,
ESR and mass spectrometers, in the belief that university chemistry
departments would purchase these "a dozen at a time" to equip practical
teaching laboratories. The university administrators remained
steadfastly unconvinced. These seemingly laudable initiatives largely
failed, siphoning off key personnel and funding that would have been
better devoted to supporting the core NMR business. Perhaps management
indulged in a misplaced over-reliance on the dogma of the "return on
investment" calculation, which implicitly writes off past losses as if
they had never happened, thus imparting a false rosy glow to any
disastrous project? More importantly, ruthless American business
administration methods that work for a shoe factory may be much less
successful when applied to an enterprise like Varian NMR.
"WINTER"(11)
The bombshell. It began with what appeared to be positive news.
On 14 May 2010 Agilent Technologies acquired Varian, Inc for
approximately $1.5 billion in cash. The president and CEO of Agilent
was quoted as saying, "The Varian acquisition -the largest in our
company's history - furthers our evolution toward becoming a global
leader in bio-analytical measurement. We're gaining tremendous talent
and technology". Most Varian watchers, after the initial shock, decided
that this acquisition was in fact a good thing, arguing that the
original Hewlett-Packard (the predecessor of Agilent) was widely
regarded as a fine example of a well-run company. It was suggested that
the (former) Varian would benefit from the new management.
In any merger one hopes for the best elements to be inherited, but fears
the worst. In this case the apparent commercial weaknesses of Varian - central
control, long command lines, and rigid processes - seem not to have been
remedied, perhaps because the Agilent organization was not particularly
well tailored to the supply of relatively small numbers of high-cost NMR
spectrometers and MRI scanners. Agilent's progressive withdrawal, first
from medical imaging and then from high field NMR, represented the writing
on the wall, but it still came as a shock and a bitter disappointment when
they announced (on 14 October 2014) the immediate closure of their NMR
business, essentially putting an end to the Varian era. Notice the reprise
of the simplistic mantra (quoted above) for justifying the termination of
an unprofitable operation. By closing down the whole NMR, MRI and magnet
operation, Agilent has done a great disservice to a distinguished heritage
and to a scientific community that had been faithful to Varian through
thick and thin.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The worst
military defeat ever suffered by the Roman Empire was in 9 AD, when a
German guerrilla force in the Teutoburg Forest annihilated three entire
legions, led by the general Publius Quinctilius Varus (12). Historians know this as the clades Variana
- the Varian disaster. Was Varian NMR simply outclassed by nimbler
competition? The rivalry between Varian and Bruker undoubtedly helped
to drive major improvements in instrumentation, but until very recently
it could still be argued that neither company had a clear technical
lead. The principal differences between them lay rather in their
commercial organizations, with local Bruker operations enjoying higher
levels of autonomy, and greater flexibility in responding to customer
needs.
It is left to the reader to judge the reasons behind the decision to
shut down the Varian NMR operation in this ruthless manner; it is
perhaps too soon to reach any meaningful verdict. Future MBA student
projects will doubtless examine how it was possible to pay an immense
cash sum to acquire another company, and then close it down after just
four short years. The wider science community will deplore the massive
and irreplaceable loss of personnel and expertise in the key areas of
chemistry, structural biology and clinical imaging. Here the most
widespread reaction will be incomprehension. There remains an acute
sense of loss, resentment, and even betrayal, not least at the lay-off
of hundreds of former employees, many of whom were popular and respected
members of the NMR family. Scientists in general will mourn the
disappearance of an enterprise that contributed so much to research,
that worked so hard to popularize NMR in chemistry, that greatly
extended the scope and performance of spectrometers, that enabled users
to devise a rich field of new pulse programs, and that bequeathed a
valuable legacy for future instrument development. Colleagues in other
branches of science will feel a chill wind: if a management misjudgment
can lead to such a sudden and irreparable loss of personnel and
expertise in a field so central to progress in so many areas, we are all
losers.
The cornerstone of western business doctrine is the need for
competition, but the unexpected demise of Varian NMR creates a virtual
monopoly. Will another company (the remaining competitor JEOL for
example) take up the challenge? The hope is that the managers of the
Bruker organization will realize the enormous responsibility that has
now fallen on their shoulders. To sit back and reap the profits would be
unworthy of that company. In contrast, to emulate the early Varian
"philanthropic" vision and vigorously promote magnetic resonance would
be applauded by the entire community. After all, Varian NMR first
evolved in an environment where there was little serious competition,
and the story outlined above suggests no evidence that the young company
exploited its near monopoly; rather the opposite.
This sad end to a famous company cannot alter the fact that science will
continue to benefit from the Varian legacy far into the future. It is
surely impossible to conceive of chemistry today without NMR, and the
later development of magnetic resonance imaging owes a great deal to its
predecessor. The Varian innovations that have been described above add
up to an enormous positive contribution to science. Perhaps we may
look forward to a new springtime?
"Acknowledgements"
The authors are indebted to Martin Packard, Wes Anderson, Howard Hill, and James Keeler for helpful comments.
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References
(1) R. H. Varian and S. F. Varian, A High Frequency Oscillator and Amplifier, J. Appl. Phys. 10, 321 (1939).
(2) R. H. Varian, US patent 2,561,490, filed 21 October 1948.
(3) National Historic Chemical Landmark at Agilent Technologies, Inc., in Santa Clara, California.
(4) W. A. Anderson, US patent 3,173,084, filed 30 April 1963.
(5) P. C. Lauterbur, Nature 242, 190 (1973).
(6) R. H. Varian, US patent 3,287,629 filed 29 August 1956.
(7) W. A. Anderson, Laboratory notebook, 3 June 1964, Encyclopedia of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Eds. D. M. Grant and R. K. Harris, Vol. 1, p. 175.
(8) R. R. Ernst and W. A. Anderson, Rev. Sci. Instr. 37, 93 (1966).
(9) J. W. Cooley and J. W. Tukey, Math. Computation, 19, 297 (1965).
(10) Harry Weaver, Historical Comments on the Early Years of Superconducting NMR, Encyclopedia of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Eds. D. M. Grant and R. K. Harris, Vol 1, pp. 689-691.
(11) "Now is the winter of our discontent", Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1.
(12) C. Suetonius Tranquillus, Lives of the Caesars, Caesar Augustus.
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