The technology of MRI – magnetic reasonance imaging – has been categorized both as one of the most useful imaging tools in modern medicine and as the symbol of a modernist utopian craving for the transparent body – see Isabelle Dussauge's Technomedical Visions: Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 1980s Sweden (2008). The two developers of MRI – Professors Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield – were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their roles in the early development of MRI in 2003. This book describes the path of the latter to the Nobel Prize in autobiographical form.

Mansfield was born in 1933, in a working-class family situated in London. At the outbreak of war, he had reached the age of five. Memories of close encounters with the German V-1 and V-2 bombs are intertwined in the book, with recollections about family life, hobbies (for example ‘bang chemistry’, i.e. homemade fireworks) and school. After leaving school, young Mansfield spent some time in printing work, and enrolled in evening classes, where he studied maths and physics, and later chemistry. While studying, he nurtured a growing interest in rocketry, which he was able to work with from 1952, as a scientific assistant at the Rocket Propulsion Department in Westcott. After his National Service he went on to qualify for university, which led him to a first-class honours degree in physics. In 1959 he moved on to do a PhD, which involved building a spectrometer suitable for studying solids. Later his interests shifted towards NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) imaging. After taking his PhD in 1962, he married Jean Kibble, whom he had met in 1956. They went on to spend two years in the United States, where Mansfield did a postdoc at the Physics Department in Urbana, Illinois.

On his return from the US, Mansfield was appointed lecturer in Nottingham. Apart from teaching, he set up a laboratory in order to build a multiple-pulse spectrometer that later was used to study the NMR response from solids. This work was done together with a Canadian student, Donald Ware. The research with multiple-pulse NMR continued and flourished over the years with contributions from many students, among them Peter Grannell.

In 1972 Mansfield, together with his family, which now included two daughters, went to Heidelberg for a sabbatical, a year that turned out to be critical for the development of NMR diffraction. This involved much correspondence with Grannell, and extracts from this correspondence are published throughout the text. Mansfield also recalls how, in 1973, he was made aware of the work of Paul Lauterbur, which had used liquids instead of solids for imaging. From that point on in the book, the description of the different research milestones is intense, and one can almost feel the competition going on.

While describing the work, important publications, cooperation, influences, patent work, university politics, the important role of a vice-chancellor and research funding, Mansfield also gives his view of the ‘Antagonisms to MRI’ (pp. 193–200), and of the antagonists towards MRI, or to Mansfield's research. The Nobel festivities of 2003 are described in great detail, as well as honours and prizes received afterwards. The latter is understandable, but gives the impression, together with the title and the general dramaturgy of the book, that Mansfield has solely lived his life striving for the Nobel Prize. At the end of the book Mansfield also lists a number of people who have been of great importance for him over the years. The book closes with an appendix covering the elementary principles of MRI. It is illustrated with black-and-white photographs of the Nobel medal, family and lab members.

Apart from being an interesting account by one of the key individuals in the development of MRI, the book also, indirectly, gives a kind of source material, interesting for those engaged in the history of physics, the gendered norms of science, the scientific family (none of the daughters seem to have developed any interest in physics; however, one son-in-law is employed in Mansfield's scientific company), research funding, and the institutional support necessary for making scientific contributions. However, it would have been interesting also to learn of Mansfield's own thoughts on the medical advantages of MRI, as well as his opinions on the Western need for a transparent body, not to mention his motivations for undertaking this research. Such reflections are lacking in the book.