"Pulse pair technique in high resolution NMR" a reprint of the historical 1971 lecture notes on two-dimensional...

The review articles published in "Progress in NMR Spectroscopy" are usually invited treatments of topics of current interest, but occasionally the Editorial Board may take an initiative to publish important historical material that is not widely available. The present article represents just such a case. Jean Jeener gave a lecture in 1971 at a summer school in Basko Polje, in what was then called Yugoslavia. As is now widely known, Jean Jeener laid down the foundations in that lecture of two - and higher - dimensional NMR spectroscopy by proposing the homonuclear COSY experiment. Jeener realized that the new proposal would open the door towards protein NMR and molecular structure determinations, but he felt that useful versions of such experiments could not be achieved with the NMR, computer and electronics technology available at that time, so that copies of the lecture notes were circulated (the Basko Polje lecture notes by J. Jeener and G. Alewaeters), but no formal publication followed. Fortunately, Ernst, Freeman, Griffin, and many others were more far-sighted and optimistic. An early useful extension was Ernst's proposal to replace the original projection/reconstruction technique of MRI by the widely adopted Fourier transform method inspired by the Basko Polje lecture. Later, the pulse method spread over many fields of spectroscopy as soon as the required technology became available. Jean Jeener, Emeritus professor, Université Libre de Bruxelles. Geoffrey Bodenhausen, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris.