Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI scanning, is a diagnostic technique now familiar to virtually anyone who has had a bad back, a damaged knee or a suspected stroke.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Oxford biochemist Sir George Radda, who has died aged 88, worked with the same underlying physics to generate not an image, but a spectrum that revealed the biochemical state of muscles and organs. For the first time, it was possible to diagnose metabolic diseases without invasive tissue samples.
An ambitious and hard-working scientist, Radda became head of the British Medical Research Council (MRC) in 1996. One of the projects he helped deliver in this role was UK Biobank, a database of 500,000 volunteers who contributed genetic information, medical history and questionnaires on topics such as nutrition and mental health. The Biobank has proven to be an invaluable source of data for researchers investigating the links between genetics, lifestyle and disease.
MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) take advantage of the fact that the nuclei of atoms in materials, including living tissue, are magnetic and align when placed in a magnetic field. A shock of radio waves causes them to lose their balance for a moment, and when they regain their equilibrium, the atoms emit a spectrum of characteristic signals.
In the early 1970s, Radda, as leader of a group in the biochemistry department of the University of Oxford, worked with Rex Richards, a professor of chemistry, to study enzymes in solution. Richards had raised money to commission Oxford Instruments (OI) to develop a superconducting magnet for MRS research into test tube solutions.
In 1974, young researchers from the joint MRS group made the astonishing discovery that you could get a spectrum from a whole rat muscle, and not just from a suspension of dissociated cells. It raised the question of whether you could get a spectrum from a living animal, or from part of a human body.
Radda obtained the significant funding OI needed to design and build a spectrometer large and powerful enough to support a whole, anesthetized laboratory animal or a human arm or leg.
Successful testing by the MRS team led to the machine being moved to the nearby Radcliffe Infirmary, where Radda set up a clinical research facility. In 1981, the team published the successful diagnosis of the rare metabolic disease McArdle in a human patient. By the late 1980s, Radda had set up a new clinical facility at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, with a spectrometer large enough to take a human body, to investigate disorders of the brain and heart. Medical MRS is still used, although MRI has proven broader clinical applications.
Born Győrgy Károly Radda in Győr, Hungary, Radda was the son of doctors Gyula Radda and Anna Bernolak. Before entering, he was educated at the Benedictine monastery of Pannonhalma Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest to study chemistry.
After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, he decided to leave the country and seek his fortune elsewhere. His parents agreed, as long as he brought his younger brother and older sister. They bribed border guards and walked into Austria, along with many of the 200,000 other Hungarian refugees who were leaving the country at the same time.
In Vienna, the penniless Radda was interviewed by Oxford professors who were recruiting refugee students for British universities. They placed him on a flight to Britain with thirty others, of whom only four, including Radda, were ultimately selected to study at Oxford University.
He was admitted to Merton College after a two-month crash course in English, and went on to gain a first-class degree and DPhil in chemistry. Through university connections, he obtained naturalized British citizenship, which allowed him to accept a Fulbright grant to work at the University of California, Berkeley, with the biochemist Melvin Calvin, who had just won a Nobel Prize.
He returned to a research fellowship in the Department of Biochemistry at Oxford, where he carried out his research into enzymes and clinically oriented MRS. In 1984 he was appointed professor of molecular cardiology at the British Heart Foundation and in 1991 became head of the department of biochemistry.
In his years as head of the MRC, from 1996 to 2003, Radda led what the journal Nature described as “the biggest shake-up in funding… for university research in three decades”. Essentially, the changes prioritized large, long-term, multidisciplinary collaborative projects like Biobank over “curiosity-driven,” smaller projects that relied on the inventiveness of individual group leaders.
He also introduced a new system for assessing whether or not such smaller projects would be funded; but with less money available, even those with the best ratings could not be assured of receiving money.
He also sought to close the long-established and highly regarded National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) in Mill Hill, London, and bring it under the wing of a top university such as Cambridge. These changes caused an uproar, especially at universities outside the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London, where scientists feared they would be frozen out.
Matters came to a head in 2003, when the House of Commons science and technology committee released a highly critical report on the way the MRC had allocated its funding. Radda’s term ended later that year and his successor, Colin Blakemore, had an uphill task to repair relations.
However, Biobank is now considered a great success, and NIMR was eventually closed in 2015 and merged with other institutions to form the multidisciplinary Francis Crick Institute in Camden, a partnership between six biomedical research organizations including the MRC and University College London.
Radda has received many honours, including a CBE at the 1993 Anniversary Awards and a knighthood in 2000 for services to biomedical sciences. Shortly after leaving the MRC, he was invited by Philip Yeo, the executive chairman of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A-STAR) in Singapore, to advise on the development of research there.
At the same time, he accepted an offer from the University of Oxford to take on the task of merging two research departments, physiology and anatomy, and become founding head of the new department of physiology, anatomy and genetics, a position he held from 2006 until 2008.
From 2009, he was chairman of the Biomedical Research Council in Singapore, where he oversaw a cluster of research institutes. He commuted to Singapore every month for more than a decade, becoming an honorary citizen in 2015 and finally retiring in 2016, when he was 80 years old.
In his spare time, Radda found time to attend opera productions and build his collection of jazz recordings. He spoke five languages, was widely read and had knowledge of art. However, science was his passion. He was disappointed to discover that, due to advancing ill health, he no longer had the drive or ideas to start another project at the age of eighty.
In the last year of his life, he recorded an interview for the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (which he had helped found). Unfortunately, he told retired OI scientist Roy Gordon: “You can’t do good science part-time… You have to say: that’s enough.”
Radda met Mary O’Brien, a fellow student, while doing his DPhil at Oxford. They married in 1961 and had three children, Ann, Mark and Jonathan, but later divorced. In 1995 he married Sue Bailey, who worked in the biochemistry department at Oxford. She survives him, as do his children.