Editorial-50 Years of NMR
When the members of the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel prize for physics to Edward M. Purcell and Felix Bloch in 1952 for their pioneering experiments made during December 1945 and January 1946, they recognized an outstanding scientific achievement. They could hardly have imagined, however, that the discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and solids would initiate a new field of research that would soon spread over the borders of physics to chemistry and later to biology and even medicine. In the meantime, two additional Nobel prizes have been awarded to researchers in NMR (Alfred Kastler 1966, Richard R. Ernst 1991) and, considering for example the importance gained by the NMR imaging techniques, there are surely others to come.
As far as chemistry is concerned, our field was on the tracks of the physicists right from the beginning. Pioneers like J. N. Shoolery, H. S. Gutowsky, and J. D. Robert-to name only a few-recognized early the power of the method for the investigation of structure and dynamics in chemical compounds. NMR soon became not only one of the most versatile tools of molecular spectroscopy, but also an invaluable laboratory aid for the bench chemist. As early as 1959 the famous monograph by Pople, Schneider and Bernstein demonstrated the enormous breadth of the method. Since then the literature on NMR has grown every year, with more than 12000 Chemical Abstracts citations of original NMR papers alone in 1993. For the same year, Beilstein cites more than 70000 new compounds which were investigated by NMR.
As a Journal dedicated to NMR, we shall commemorate the NMR discovery during the coming year with a number of special contributions. Apart from this, it is my pleasure as Editor-in-Chief to invite our authors to submit their best manuscripts for publication in order to celebrate the unique experiments by Bloch and Purcell which layed the basis for our field 50 years ago.