Dr. Edwin D. Becker 3 May 1930 – 4 August 2025
ISMAR mourns the passing of Dr. Edwin (Ted) D. Becker, former Secretary General of ISMAR and ISMAR Fellow. Ted was a dedicated leader, teacher and effective advocate of Magnetic Resonance worldwide and dear friend to many of us.
He is survived by his wife, Suzanne, and his two children, Carl and Lynn.
Our thoughts are with his family and friends.
Stephan Grzesiek
ISMAR President
The following tribute was written by Drs. Ad Bax and Robert Tycko
With great sadness, we inform you that our colleague and friend Ted Becker passed away on August 4, a few months after his 95th birthday. With his passing, the magnetic resonance community has lost a passionate leader and supporter who dedicated much of his career to helping others.
Ted received his Ph.D. in chemistry from U.C. Berkeley in 1955. Heavily recruited, wined and dined by multiple major companies, Ted also visited the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and decided that this institution would allow him to make more meaningful contributions to the world. He was one of the first physical chemists at the NIH, initially focused on Raman spectroscopy. Ted switched his focus to NMR when the first commercial instrumentation became available in the late 1950s, in particular after receiving delivery of the “workhorse” Varian-A60 spectrometer. His research covered a broad area, ranging from elegant early pulse sequence development, including the classic DEFT scheme for enhancing sensitivity of Fourier transform NMR, improved “rapid scan” FT technology, as well as the study of hydrogen bonding, molecular self-assembly, and hemoglobin gelation kinetics related to sickle cell disease.
Frustrated by the bureaucracy that impeded scientific progress at the NIH, in 1980 Ted took on the task of facilitating research as Associate Director for Research Services at the NIH. His responsibilities as Associate Director encompassed much of the day-by-day operations, including building management, security and, most importantly, procurement which was the prototypically slow grinding bureaucratic machinery that had proven to be a bottleneck in so many projects. Against all odds, he succeeded in dramatically reducing the paperwork required for small purchases, a change that positively impacted the entire NIH research community.
Ted was instrumental in attracting Ad Bax to the NIH to fill the vacancy that resulted from his move to the high-intensity administrative position. After returning to the Laboratory of Chemical Physics in 1988, Ted also played a major role in the hiring of Robert Tycko, while providing very useful “insider advice” during Rob’s early years at the NIH. By his genuine and unassuming interest in their research and selfless sharing of his profound knowledge, he also very much inspired and encouraged the thriving community of the many postdocs and PhD students at NIH.
In the early 1980s, Ted foresaw the profound impact that NMR technology would have on medicine. At a time when Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) were still emerging techniques, Ted recognized their potential for non-invasive diagnosis and research. The NIH campus was already home to exceptional scientific expertise. Yet the hurdles were formidable: the technology was expensive, and the powerful magnets used in MRI demanded large, dedicated spaces—especially challenging to find at the NIH. Rather than let these obstacles deter progress, Ted envisioned a cooperative solution. He proposed the creation of a centralized NMR research center that would serve the needs of multiple Institutes, a concept that was nearly unheard of at the time. Thanks to his scientific credibility and personal integrity, Institutes across the NIH trusted Ted’s leadership. The Center has hosted and continues to host many of the international leaders in MRI and MRS, including Robert Balaban, Alan Koretsky, David Hoult, Denis LeBihan, Chrit Moonen, Peter van Zijl, Jeff Duyn, and many others. Ted’s calm and patient demeanor invariably was key in fostering collaborations even when the available resources were too few to serve the rapid rise in demand for MRI-based work.
Ted was a close friend of ISMAR for its entire existence. He served as Secretary of its Division of Biology and Medicine from 1986-1989, and on the ISMAR Council from 1990-1999. In 2005, he stepped in as Secretary General to help bring ISMAR back from the brink at a time when administrative and financial aspects of the Society were at a low point. Infusing new energy into ISMAR, he carried out an enormous amount of hands-on work to get its books in order, and to regain tax exempt status. He also collected a complete set of ISMAR’s then-defunct journal “Bulletin of Magnetic Resonance” and converted it to pdf-format, now accessible from the ISMAR website, which represents a true historical treasure of information.
More than anyone, Ted has devoted most of his life to helping his scientific colleagues, both at the NIH, in the world-wide NMR community, and beyond that in the international chemistry community. He chaired and co-chaired numerous scientific conferences, including the 1969 ENC, the 1996 ICMRBS, and a host of smaller meetings. In the broader chemical community, he served as Chair of the International Activities Committee of the American Chemical Society, from 1993-95. He also took on the role of Secretary-General of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), a very labor-intensive task that among other functions establishes nomenclature rules and guidelines. This tedious but essential work continues to serve the entire chemistry community.
Ted loved teaching the next generations of scientists, and for nearly 40 years he taught physical chemistry at both Georgetown University and the FAES Graduate School at the NIH. He published over 100 papers in the area of molecular spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance. He also authored two popular NMR textbooks, including three editions of High Resolution Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (Academic Press) and, in 1971 with Tom Farrar, the thin but classic text Pulse and Fourier Transform NMR (Academic Press). Ted also was the principal editor for Volume 1 of the Encyclopedia of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance: Historical Perspectives (Wiley, 1995) that contains a treasure of personal perspectives on the early stages of our field.
We highly recommend Ted’s article in Analytical Chemistry from 1993, entitled “A Brief History of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance” https://doi.org/10.1021/ac00054a716, to all ISMAR members. This article is an excellent demonstration of Ted’s deep and broad appreciation for all aspects of NMR, as well as the clarity of his writing and thinking. The article also puts the many technological advances and novel developments in applications that occurred during Ted’s career in a proper and coherent perspective.
Ted received numerous recognitions for his work, including the 1966 Coblentz Memorial Prize in Chemical Spectroscopy; the 1971 Washington Academy of Sciences Award in Physical Sciences; he became an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1988; Inaugural Fellow of the American Chemical Society (2009); a Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences of India in 1992; and he received the prestigious Distinguished Service Award in Analytical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 2006.
Ted’s love for chocolate was almost legendary. When he was Associate Director, overlapping the Unabomber era, he returned from a meeting to find his assistants nervously and carefully unwrapping a package that had been delivered by a tall, unshaven man in a trench coat, who had walked onto the then unguarded campus and into Building 1. The man stated in an Eastern European accent "this is for Dr. Becker", turned and left. It turned out the package contained some of the finest European chocolates which somebody had asked this man to deliver when they learned that he would be visiting Bethesda.
Ted’s departure leaves us with a large and painful void, but also with great memories and numerous examples of how patience and persuasion are more effective than stomping feet or raising voices. Ted loved and breathed NMR and as a Society we continue to benefit from the enormous amount of work he carried out so selflessly to help others.
Ad Bax
Robert Tycko