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Nicolaas Bloembergen may have gotten the Nobel for his laser spectroscopy work, but before that he (as his PhD!) pioneered NMR, which is also the underpinning for MRI. His graduate studies were somewhat interrupted by the German invasion of the Netherlands during the second world war, "hiding indoors from the Nazis, eating tulip bulbs to fill the stomach and reading Kramers' book "Quantum Theorie des Elektrons und der Strahlung" by the light of a storm lamp." A remarkable man, and it's amazing to see his ideas still bearing fruit.