Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI scanning, is a diagnostic technique that is now familiar to almost anyone who has had a bad back, a damaged knee or a suspected stroke.
During the 1970s and 80s 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 the muscles and organs. For the first time it was possible to diagnose metabolic diseases without invasive tissue sampling.
An ambitious and hard-working scientist, in 1996 Radda went on to head the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC). Among the projects he helped to drive through in this role was UK Biobank, a database of 500,000 volunteers who have contributed genetic information, medical histories and questionnaires on subjects such as diet and mental health. Biobank has proved an invaluable source of data for researchers investigating the connections between genetics, lifestyle and disease.
MRI and magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) capitalise on the fact that the nuclei of atoms in materials, including living tissue, are magnetic and line up if placed in a magnetic field. A jolt of radio waves will knock them briefly out of alignment, and as they come back to rest the atoms emit a spectrum of characteristic signals.
In the early 70s, leading a group in Oxford University’s biochemistry department, Radda collaborated with Rex Richards, a chemistry professor, to study enzymes in solution. Richards had raised funds to commission Oxford Instruments (OI) to develop a superconducting magnet for MRS studies of solutions in test tubes.
In 1974, young researchers from the joint MRS group made the astonishing discovery that you could get a spectrum from a whole rat muscle, not just from a suspension of dissociated cells. It raised the question of whether you might get a spectrum from a living animal, or part of a human body.
Radda obtained the considerable funds needed for OI to design and build a spectrometer large and powerful enough to take either a whole, anaesthetised 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 its successful diagnosis of the rare metabolic disorder McArdle disease in a human patient. By the end of the 80s, Radda had established a new clinical facility at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital, with a spectrometer large enough to take a human body, to investigate conditions of the brain and heart. Medical MRS is still in use today, though MRI has proved to have wider clinical applications.
Born György Radda in Győr, Hungary, he was the son of Anna Bernolak and Gyula Radda, both doctors. He was educated at the Benedictine monastery of Pannonhalma before entering 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 took his younger brother and older sister with him. Bribing border guards, they walked across into Austria, along with many of the 200,000 other Hungarian refugees who left the country at the same time.
In Vienna the destitute Radda was interviewed by Oxford professors who were recruiting refugee students for British universities. They put him on a flight to the UK with 30 others, of whom just four, including Radda, were eventually selected to study at Oxford University.
He was admitted to Merton College after a two-month crash course in English, and went on to obtain a first-class degree and DPhil in chemistry. Through college connections he obtained naturalised British citizenship, enabling him to accept a Fulbright scholarship 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 Oxford’s biochemistry department, where he carried out his research on enzymes and clinically oriented MRS. In 1984 he was named the British Heart Foundation professor of molecular cardiology, and in 1991 became head of the department of biochemistry.
In his years as head of the MRC, from 1996 to 2003, Radda spearheaded what the journal Nature described as “the biggest shake-up of its funding … for university research for three decades”. Essentially the changes prioritised big, long-term, multidisciplinary collaborative projects such as 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 that were rated the best could not be certain of receiving funds.
He also attempted to close down the long-established and highly regarded National Institute of Medical Research (NIMR) at Mill Hill, London, and to bring it under the wing of a top university such as Cambridge. These changes caused uproar, especially in universities outside the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge and London, where scientists feared they were being frozen out.
Things came to a head in 2003, when the House of Commons science and technology select committee issued a highly critical report of the way the MRC had allocated its funding. Radda’s term of office ended later that year and his successor, Colin Blakemore, had an uphill task to mend relationships.
However, Biobank is now regarded as a huge success, and NIMR did eventually close in 2015, merging with other institutions to form the multidisciplinary Francis Crick Institute in Camden, a partnership between six biomedical research organisations including the MRC and University College London.
Radda received many honours, including a CBE in the 1993 birthday honours and a knighthood in 2000 for his services to biomedical science. Soon after he left 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.
Concurrently he accepted Oxford University’s offer to take on the task of merging two research departments, physiology and anatomy, and to become founding head of the new department of physiology, anatomy and genetics, a post he held from 2006 to 2008.
From 2009 he chaired Singapore’s Biomedical Research Council, overseeing a cluster of research institutes. For more than a decade he commuted to Singapore every month, becoming an honorary citizen in 2015 and eventually retiring in 2016 when he was 80 years old.
In his spare time, Radda found time to attend opera productions and build up his collection of jazz recordings. Speaking five languages, he was widely read and knowledgable about art. Science was his passion, however. He was disappointed to find that, with encroaching ill-health, he no longer had the drive or the ideas to start another project in his 80s.
In the last year of his life he recorded an interview for the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (which he had helped to found). Regretfully, he told retired OI scientist Roy Gordon: “You cannot 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.