Richard R. Ernst was congratulated by the president of Switzerland and friends in Zurich, who organized a party to celebrate his award of the 1991 Nobel Prize in chemistry, while he was in flight to receive another award from Columbia University. The pilot of the aircraft called Ernst into the cockpit to give him the news. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted in its citation of the award that Ernst's development of the methodology of high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is the most important instrumental measuring technique within chemistry. Ernst's contributions in this field led to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the biomedical instrument widely used today to perform noninvasive diagnosis of the human body.

Born on August 14, 1933, to Robert Ernst and Irma Brunner in Winterthur, Switzerland, Richard Robert Ernst was educated at the Eidgenössiche Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, where he received...