George Radda

Who is George Radda?

Sir George Charles Radda CBE MA DPhil FRS is a Hungarian chemist, born 9 June 1936. In 1957 he attended Merton College, Oxford to study chemistry, having set aside an earlier interest in literary criticism. His early work was concerned with the development and use of fluorescent probes for the study of structure and function of membranes and enzymes. He became interested in using spectroscopic methods including nuclear magnetic resonance to study complex biological material. In 1974, his research paper was the first to introduce the use of NMR to study tissue metabolites. In 1981, he and his colleagues published the first scientific report on the clinical application of his work. This resulted in the installation of a magnet large enough to accommodate the whole human body for NMR investigations in 1983 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

He has received numerous prestigious awards and honours for his pioneering efforts in using spectroscopic techniques for metabolic studies, including a Buchanan Medal in 1987, an CBE in June 1993 and a knighthood in June 2000.