The 'modest genius' from a Caithness family who became a Nobel Prize winner
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Professor Allan MacLeod Cormack is remembered as a "modest genius" whose pioneering work as a physicist led to him becoming a Nobel Prize winner. He and Professor Godfrey Hounsfield were honoured jointly in 1979 for developing computed tomography (CT) scanning, a technology that has become a vital element of medical diagnostics and has benefited hundreds of millions of patients around the world.
Cormack was born in South Africa 100 years ago today on February 23, 1924. In 1966 he became a naturalised citizen of the United States. Unquestionably, though, he was an honorary son of Caithness: his family tree is firmly rooted in the Wick area and he never lost sight of his strong links to the far north of Scotland.
In 2008, a decade after Professor Cormack's death, a new £800,000 CT scanner suite at Caithness General Hospital was named in his honour and his younger daughter, Jean Cormack, travelled from America to attend the opening ceremony. A plaque was unveiled by Anne Dunnett, in her role as Lord-Lieutenant of Caithness, and an information panel was installed giving a summary of the professor's life and achievements.
"I know he would have been honoured and touched by this tribute from a place he remembered so fondly," Jean Cormack said at the time. "The family is now scattered to England, the United States, Canada and South Africa but we are all very happy to have our link with Wick strengthened in this way."
That same year, 2008, saw the publication of a 320-page biography by Professor Christopher (Kit) Vaughan, emeritus professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Cape Town, called Imagining the Elephant. Proceeds would go to the university's Allan Cormack Book Fund, established by the Cormack family to support science students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The book's title comes from an Indian parable about the importance of seeing things from as many perspectives as possible, a concept that is at the heart of computed tomography. In the foreword, Cormack's older sister Amelia (Amy) wrote of his "very astute mind" and "wonderful imagination", describing him as "full of fun".
The title of the opening chapter, "John O’Groats to Jo’burg", gives a foretaste of the extent to which Cormack's Caithness heritage was an important part of his story. Indeed, towards the end of his life, he had hired a genealogist to help him delve into it further.
Vaughan showed that the fishing industry was a recurring theme in Cormack's family tree. His great-great-grandfather, John Cormack (1790-1862), was a ship's captain who died at sea. Cormack’s maternal great-grandfather, Allan MacLeod (1823-1901), was an assistant harbour master in 1863 when work started on the Stevenson breakwater in Wick Bay. His paternal great-grandfather, George Cormack (1829-1907), began his career as a fisherman, captaining a boat called Maggie, and set up a fish-curing business in Pulteneytown.
Vaughan noted that portraits of three of Cormack’s great-grandparents and three of his grandparents were taken by Wick photographer Alexander Johnston.
Cormack’s parents, George Cormack (1884-1936) and Amelia MacLeod (1883-1968), were cousins. George's home was in Harbour Quay and he worked as a telegraphic messenger. Amelia, who lived in Smith Terrace, trained as a teacher and was a skilled watercolour painter.
In 1903 George Cormack emigrated to Natal province as a telegraphist. It wasn't until a decade later, in 1913, that Amelia sailed off to join George and they were married on the day she arrived in South Africa.
The couple moved when George was transferred to the post office at Johannesburg, the city that would become Allan MacLeod Cormack's birthplace. He had an older brother, William (1914-2005), as well as sister Amelia (1918-2008).
There would be "numerous pilgrimages" to Caithness, in Vaughan's words. One family photo shows the Cormacks – including two-year-old Allan – enjoying a day out at John O'Groats.
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After completing his BSc and MSc degrees at Cape Town, Cormack went to St John’s College, Cambridge, as a research student. He met an American physics student, Barbara Seavey, in Paul Dirac’s lectures on quantum mechanics, and they were married in 1950.
He returned to Cape Town, working on nuclear physics, before moving to the USA. He was based at Tufts University in Massachusetts from 1957 onwards, latterly as emeritus professor.
Barbara (1924-2010) worked as a lecturer at the University of Cape Town. While raising the family in America, she was a volunteer and research assistant at the Department of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University and the Harvard College Observatory, and later worked as an analyst.
Cormack's breakthrough was to devise a mathematical method for measuring different tissue densities within the body and to predict that this could be used in diagnosis.
"Cormack won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his theories together with Godfrey Hounsfield, who invented the machine which allowed computers to produce three-dimensional graphic images based on computed tomography of X-rays," Vaughan wrote. "Cormack’s theory was also in accordance with the later discovery of MRI, and it greatly contributed to the world of medical science."
Cormack died in Winchester, Massachusetts, on May 7, 1998. He was 74.
He was posthumously awarded South Africa's Order of Mapungubwe (gold) in 2002 for outstanding achievements as a scientist and for co-inventing the CT scanner.
The Cormack children would all go on to have distinguished careers.
Dr Margaret Cormack (71) has a degree in medieval studies. She taught for 22 years in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, before retiring to Reykjavik where she continues her research on medieval Icelandic history.
Dr Jean Cormack (68) worked in the plant breeding industry before becoming a biostatistician at Brown University in Rhode Island. She is now a biostatistician on a multi-centre breast cancer screening research project. She lives in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
Dr Robert Cormack (59) is associate professor of radiation oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
In 2019, Tufts University held a conference marking the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize win and a biographical talk on Cormack – with a strong emphasis on his Scottish ancestry – was given by his nephew George Read, of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada.
Vaughan said: "Professor Allan Cormack conducted his ground-breaking research at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town in 1956/57, 10 years before Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first heart transplant. In 2004, six years after Allan passed away, I approached his family with the idea of writing a book about the man, and they responded positively.
"So, for the next three years my odyssey took me from Cape Town to England, visiting Cambridge University, where Allan studied from 1947-1950, to Scotland, where his forebears all originated, to Boston in the USA, where he spent the last 40 years of his life. This is the story about a family man who was often described as a 'modest genius'.
"The first computer tomographic (CT) scan of a patient was performed at a hospital in London on October 1, 1971, and over 50 years later, each year more than 100 million patients worldwide undergo the procedure. It has contributed to diagnosis of disease, cancer management, assessment of trauma, brain imaging, cardiac imaging and surgical planning. It is no exaggeration to say that the CT scanner has had a profound impact, benefiting the lives of many millions of patients around the world."
- Imagining the Elephant was published in 2008 by Imperial College Press and hard copies are on sale online. A PDF version is available directly from Professor Vaughan, free of charge. His email address is kit@caperay.com
