The Dutch physicist Gorter predicted in 1936, on theoretical grounds, the existence of the magnetic resonance (MR) phenomenon. This was ten years before Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell, independently of each other in different experimental settings, demonstrated it. Current medical and biological applications of magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy are directly derived from in vitro tissue studies performed in the 1960s and 1970s. Although Odelbiad and co-workers published as early as 1956 an MR study of human red blood cells, this and other early work was limited by the unavailability of suitable MR instrumentation.