Since 2005, the German Section of ISMRM has awarded a prize for the best work of a young scientist in medicine or a natural science at its annual meeting.
The prize was named after Cornelis Jacobus Gorter (1907–1980), a Dutch physicist who researched and taught in Groningen and Amsterdam before becoming director of the Kammerlingh-Onnes Laboratory in Leiden in 1948.
Cornelis Gorter has only worked in magnetic resonance (MR) for a while, but he is an essential person in the history of MR. In 1942 – when the Germans occupied the Netherlands – he almost discovered the nuclear magnetic resonance effect in solids, using lithium-7 in LiCl crystals as a sample. He has not been able to measure the effect. He himself suspected that the reason for the failure was saturation due to too little spin-lattice relaxation. Later, it was found that the signal was too weak for his measuring apparatus, also because he had obtained a sample that was too pure and contained too few paramagnetic impurities. As relaxation centers, these would have prevented T1 saturation. A repetition of the experiment was not possible because of the conditions under the occupation.
Cornelis Gorter published his failed attempt (CJ Gorter and LJF Broer, Physica (den Haag) 1942, 9(6): 591–596), and so we count him among the pioneers of NMR. This shows that good experiments should be described accurately, even if they do not show the expected results.
Beinahe die Entdeckung des Kernspinresonanzeffektes im Festkörper.