I got there August 1986. We actually had Lauterbur back as a commencement speaker about 1991, or so. They asked him to talk about what had attracted him to chemistry. So he told us how he used to order all sorts of materials in the mail to try and make explosives of various sorts. Unfortuantely, he said, you couldn't do that any more, so he wondered why anyone would go into chemistry.
It was actually a very funny talk, though it was clear some people were taking it far too seriously.
His labs were sort of a frozen history of his research career. I swear the man never threw anything away. We found dessicated pig fetuses in drawers, and an entire human brain in a bucket (in preservative).
Oh, Lauterbur is an excellent speaker. We had him give a talk on MRI at one of the I-CON science fiction conventions on campus. (I think it was I-CON II or III.) I remember that physics professor Max Dresden (the next speaker) chastised us for introducing Prof. Lauterbur as a "Nobel Prize nominee". Apparently, saying so in public is bad form. But what do undergrads ever know?