Sir Godfrey Hounsfield (born 1919) won the Nobel Prize for medicine for co-inventing the CAT-scan (computer assisted tomography).

Sir Godfrey Hounsfield pioneered a great leap forward in medical diagnosis: computerized axial tomography, popularly known as the "CAT scan." Ushering in a new and sometimes controversial era of medical technology, Hounsfield's device allowed a doctor to look inside a patient's body and examine a three-dimensional image far more detailed than a conventional X ray. The importance of this advance was recognized in 1979, the year Hounsfield received the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was born August 28, 1919, in Newark, England, the youngest of five children of a steel-industry engineer turned farmer. Hounsfield's technical interests began when, to prevent boredom, he began figuring out how the machinery on his father's farm worked. From there he moved on to exploring electronics, and by his teens was building his own radio...