Sir George Charles Radda (; 9 June 1936 – 13 September 2024) was a Hungarian-British chemist.
Biography
Radda was born in Hungary on 9 June 1936.
In 1957, he attended Merton College, Oxford, to study
chemistry and worked on electrophilic aromatic substitution with Richard Norman and Jeremy Knowles,
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
spectroscopy methods including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) 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.
In 1982 Radda published work concerning the relationship between deoxygenated haemoglobin and the NMR signal.
From 1996 until his retirement in 2003, Radda was Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council in the UK.
Radda died on 13 September 2024, at the age of 88.[ Elhunyt Radda György Károly professzor ]
Awards
Radda received numerous prestigious awards and honours for his pioneering efforts in using spectroscopic techniques for metabolic studies, including a
Buchanan Medal in 1987.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1993 Birthday Honours for services to science, and
Knight Bachelor in the 2000 Birthday Honours for services to biomedical science.
[United Kingdom: ][United Kingdom: ]
In addition, he was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford,
In 2015, he was conferred an award as an Honorary Citizen of Singapore.
In 2018 he was awarded the Hungarian Corvin Chain. This is the second highest Hungarian state decoration and is awarded to persons who have made an outstanding contribution to the improvement of Hungarian public thought, science and culture.
External links
Interview with George Radda for the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine
