CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

David Cohen

Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

1 .1 • SOME COMMENTS ABOUT THE EARLY YEARS

Perhaps I was asked to give this introduction because I have

been working in biomagnetism for about 20 years. In that case, be-
fore reviewing progress in this area I shall reminisce a bit and
tell what it was like in the early years of this work. I shall em-
phasize two factors: the main difficulty and the main reward. The
main difficulty was certainly the skeptical attitude of the scien-
tific community toward the idea of biomagnetism, that is, that the
human body can produce weak magnetic fields which can be measured
and can be useful. The scientific trend was toward larger, stronger
quantities: larger particle accelerators, stronger magnetic fields,
and larger rockets. In those post-Sputnik years, scientists were
also smug and arrogant; they did not want to be bothered with weak
magnetic fields, and especially by the strange idea that these
could be produced by the human body I For example, in 1965 when I
was building my first shielded room for biomagnetism, I saw one day
that a large time-varying magnet was being installed in the very
next lab; its field would easily be able to penetrate my shielding.
When I complained to the appropriate officials, they responded that
biomagnetism was absurd and that I would never detect anything in
any case, so why bother moving the magnet? I am afraid the magnet
remained.

The main reward was the excitement of discovery. Consider, for

example, the heart's magnetic field. When I completed the shielded
room, Baule and McFee had already published the first heart paper,
but few believed them or took them seriously. So the first experi-
ment I did was to have a subject put his chest near an induction

S. J. Williamson et al. (eds.), Biomagnetism

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1983
6 D. COHEN

coil detector and, of course, the signal appeared. But was it real-
ly a magnetic field? Where was it coming from? Please put yourself
in the following position: someone stands with his chest (essen-
tiallya "black box") close to a coil, and you see a signal which
resembles an ECG. So far, there has been no proof that it is a mag-
netic field, and if so, that it is produced by the same currents
which produce the ECG. It could be some electrostatic artifact, or
whatever. So you put a copper shield around the torso, and the sig-
nal is unaffected, then you replace it by a high permeability
shield, and the signal disappears. You are indeed seeing a magnetic
field. Exciting? You bet. I phoned Gerhard Baule, and he quickly
flew in from Syracuse to see this. Now there were two excited char-
acters.

Then there was the brain's magnetic field. Calculations showed

that the brain's alpha rhythm should produce a magnetic field 100
or 1000 times weaker than the heart's field, and that this should
be detectable with the coil detector by signal-averaging. After
weeks of le~rning how to trigger the averager off the EEG alpha, I
saw a beautiful sine wave grow out of the coil's noise, where the
wave had the correct polarity and amplitude. Exciting? You bet.

So although there was a big difficulty, there was a big re-

ward. The reward far outweighed the difficulty. In future years,
during the mid and late 80'S, will the rewards also outweigh the
difficulties? Let me first talk about the milestones in biomagne-
tism, between those early years and now, then discuss where we are
now, and finally consider where we are going and what those diffi-
culties and rewards might be.

1.2 . MILESTONES IN BIOMAGNE'l'ISM

In the following, it is useful to consider three aspects of

biomagnetic advances: in techniques, in biomagnetic sources, and in
theoretical developments. In the first and third of these I shall
list only the major milestones, defined as those that have had a
significant impact on our area of work, in the sense that they have
influenced others, either in using the technique or the results. In
"sources" I shall list also the minor milestones, defined as those
that, although interesting, have not yet influenced the work of
others.

1.2.1. Measuring Techniques

The Room-Temperature Coil Detector. This was the first type of

detector used in biomagnetism and was introduced by Baule and MCFee
(1963). It consisted of several million turns of thin copper wire,
and had a ferrite core; two of these coils were placed side-by-side
in the gradiometer mode to cancel the magnetic background, and the