In 1940, he completed the first one, which accelerated electrons to 2 million electron volts. After World War II, he designed and directed the construction of a 300-MeV betatron that contained more than 300 tons of laminated iron in its magnets. The widest use of NMR is in medicine. Chemists, particularly in organic chemistry, have embraced NMR to make advances in understanding cells, DNA, and biomolecules. Nuclear magnetic resonance techniques are increasingly used in agriculture and soil sciences to select seeds for plant breeding and to study food production and processing.
Physicists use it to study atoms and subatomic particles.
On a larger scale, NMR has been used in the search for everything from fossile fuels to water to submarines. When John Bardeen came to Illinois in 1951, a few years after he participated at Bell Laboratories in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the principles and operation of the transistor, he accepted a joint appointment as professor of physics and of electrical engineering. At the same time, Bardeen and his students in theoretical physics developed an understanding of superconductivity in metals that led to the award in 1972 of the second Nobel Prize in which he shared. The use of radioactive isotopes to find and measure minute amounts of substances, particularly hormones, in the blood and body tissues that has been widely applied. At the 1978 commencement, Dr. Yalow was presented with an Alumni Association Achievement Award from the University of Illinois.