THIS YEAR’S NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE
30 years of proof that this shameful wrong
must be righted
why the idea of an MRI didn’t occur
to this year’s two winners until after a medical doctor
made his landmark discoveries
The initial idea for the MRI did not occur to anyone until
1969, yet the phenomenon on which it is based, magnetic resonance,
was discovered way back in 1945. The question is, what were
scientists doing with it for all those years?
The answer is that chemists and physicists were using it
to analyze what chemists and physicists think about: the structure
of chemicals and the physical properties of materials, which
is exactly what this year’s two winners of the Nobel
Prize for the MRI – the chemist Paul Lauterbur and the
physicist Peter Mansfield – were doing until after Raymond
Damadian, M. D., asked himself if the NMR phenomenon might
have a medical application.
He was a medical researcher who looked at a test tube of
a sample to which magnetic resonance was being applied and
wondered if the magnetic resonance could distinguish between
cancer tissue and normal tissue. He got samples of the two
tissue types and put them in test tubes. The signal difference
he measured between them was 185%. This was an especially
enormous number because the maximum difference by X-rays was
only 4%, a barely visible difference that explains why X-rays
were missing many cancers.
He also discovered that different types of normal tissue
yield a markedly different response to magnetic resonance,
so he realized – and was the first human being to do
so – that the NMR could also show major differences
in the normal tissues of the interior of the human body.
The rest is scientific history, that is, until this year’s
Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine got the illegitimate
notion that they could rewrite history.
MRI SCIENCE BEFORE DR. DAMADIAN’S DISCOVERIES
From the medical textbook MRI from Picture
to Proton1
“So what were NMR researchers doing between the forties
and the seventies – that’s a long time in cultural
and scientific terms. The answer is: they were doing chemistry,
including Lauterbur, a professor of chemistry at the same
institution as Damadian. NMR [nuclear magnetic resonance,
as the phenomenon was then called] developed into a laboratory
spectroscopic technique capable of examining the molecular
structure of compounds, until Damadian’s ground-breaking
discovery in 1971.”
The Winner, Paul Lauterbur, Before Damadian’s
Discoveries2
“After he was discharged from the Army, Lauterbur [a
specialist in boron chemistry] felt he wanted to continue
doing NMR work, since he saw it as a valuable technique for
a chemist to use in unlocking the secret of compounds. [Lauterbur]:
‘The problem in chemistry is you take one flask of a
substance and mix it with a second flask of a substance and
create a third substance. How do you know what you’ve
got? What is the structure of what you’ve done? These
are questions you ask every day in the chemistry laboratory....’
Since he had established himself as a powerful voice in NMR
research, it was not surprising that Lauterbur was invited
to become a member of the board of directors of Nuclear Magnetic
Resonance Specialties [where Damadian had done his original
experiments]….”
The Winner, Peter Mansfield, Before Damadian’s
Discoveries2
[Mansfield]“The team had been doing NMR studies of
various substances, and they were having quite a bit of success
but had exhausted the materials that were immediately available
in the lab. As Mansfield puts it, ‘We didn’t have
any more materials to pop into the machine. So we were wondering
what to do with it. It was going well, and it was sort of
a pity not to do something else with it.’ I was saying,
‘What can we do with it? What is it good for?’
It occurred to me in a flash around the coffee table that
we could study the distribution of atoms linearly using gradients
– basically do imaging.’ Mansfield says he was
entirely unaware at this point that Lauterbur had already
had essentially the same idea…. He later worked on the
mathematics and convinced himself that it was doable….
“Mansfield, though, was not thinking specifically of
medical applications; in the first paper he published on this
in 1974, in fact, he didn’t even make any mention of
imaging. Rather, he wrote of a general method to use an NMR
machine to detect the faces of crystals in samples that possessed
them….”
DOCTOR DAMADIAN’S DISCOVERIES1
“The initial concept for the medical application of
NMR, as it was then called, originated with the discovery
of Raymond Damadian in 1971 that certain mouse tumours displayed
elevated relaxation times compared with normal tissues in
vitro. [Called their T1 and T2 responses and still the basis
of all MRI technology. T1 and T2 responses are the reason
cancer tissue appears as white spots on MRI pictures and normal
tissue as surrounding darker areas that set off the cancer
in the picture.] This exciting discovery opened the door for
a complete new way of imaging the human body where the potential
contrast between tissues and disease was many times greater
than that offered by X-ray technology and ultrasound….
Damadian and his colleagues at the State University of New
York, starved of mainstream research funding, went so far
as to design and build their own superconducting magnet operating
in their Brooklyn laboratory and the first human body image
by NMR is attributed to them.”
MRI SCIENCE AFTER DR. DAMADIAN’S DISCOVERIES
Suddenly, lots of people started to think about the medical
applications of magnetic resonance. Two of them imagined nothing
more than an improved way to record the tissue signals Dr.
Damadian had discovered. They are this year’s two winners.
Paul Lauterbur After Damadian’s Discoveries2
“Lauterbur remembers the events well. He had seen some
of the readings being done on the rats by Economou3 [With
his companion Hollis, both from Johns Hopkins, repeating Damadian’s
experiments to confirm them], and he was intrigued by the
experiments. A candle was lit….
[Lauterbur]: “‘I had watched some of those experiments
being done. And they were seeing some differences between
the cancerous tissue and the normal tissue. A phenomenon seemed
to be at work there. But I couldn’t imagine that it
was very likely that it would be important to do such investigations
of tissue. A method that required cutting out the samples
didn’t seem all that interesting…. But it did
seem useful if you could take measurements from the intact
human body and create images. [Damadian had already very publicly
proposed the idea of and was patenting a full-body scanner.]
So I got to asking myself whether there was any conceivable
way of solving this problem.
“’And I got to thinking that magnetic field gradients
provide a general solution to this problem….’
[Magnetic gradients had come as standard equipment on NMR
machines since the 40s.] The next day he scribbled down his
idea about gradients in a tan spiral notebook, suggesting
in his notes that it could allow NMR images to be done of
the body and therefore serve as an application of Damadian’s
research.”
Here is Lauterbur’s notebook entry, where he credits
Damadian’s prior discovery: “The difference in
relaxation times that appears to be characteristic of malignant
tumors (R. Damadian, Science, 171, 1151 (1971), should be
measurable in an intact organism.”4
Peter Mansfield After Damadian’s Discoveries2
“Once he realized he could achieve spatial imaging,
he looked around for applications, and Damadian’s tumor
experiments were drawn to this attention. “So he certainly
had an influence,” he [Mansfield] said. “I think
Damadian’s work had some influence on everyone.”
MRI HISTORY FROM 1969 TO THE PRESENT
The indisputable truth of history is that the idea magnetic
resonance might have a medical application never occurred
to either of the two winners until after they observed or
were told about Dr. Damadian’s landmark tissue discoveries
and his proposal to build a human-body scanner to take advantage
of the cancer signal. You can understand the enormity of Damadian’s
idea when you realize that until then NMR machines were small
devices, with less than a two-inch opening into which a chemical
compound was placed for analysis. These NMR machines came
complete with a magnetic gradient for the scientist to adjust
to even out the signal from the compound.
No wonder so many medical textbooks and history books on
MRI credit Damadian’s tissue discoveries as the start
of MRI technology. He was awarded the prestigious National
Medal of Technology, with Paul Lauterbur, by President Reagan.
He was presented with the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement
Award by MIT. And he was inducted into the National Inventors
Hall of Fame as the inventor of the MRI. The world’s
first MRI, which he built by hand with two graduate students
and performed the world’s first full-body MRI scan with,
has been in The Smithsonian Institution since 1989.
THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT UPHELD DAMADIAN’S
MRI PATENT
Dr. Damadian was granted the first MRI patent, which was
upheld by the United States Supreme Court. The decision shows
that the Court saw no difference between Damadian’s
original discoveries about the different signals magnetic
resonance elicits from cancerous tissues and normal tissues
and the signals all the world’s MRI machines still use
to record an image.
Quote from the upheld decision of the Supreme Court:
“The assignment of a gray scale value for suspect tissue
was determined in effect by a comparison of the tissue’s
signal strength with the standard values [signal strength
of normal tissue]. This evidence provided a showing of insubstantial
differences…”
Summary from our archives: “The Court concluded
that MRI machines rely on the tissue NMR relaxations that
were claimed in the patent as a method of detecting cancer,
and that MRI machines use these tissue relaxations to control
pixel brightness and supply the image contrasts that detect
cancer in patients.” 5
THE NOBEL COMMITTEE SEEKS TO REWRITE HISTORY
All of the above history was meticulously and repeatedly
provided to the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine
over the years that the award for the MRI has been deliberated,
yet this year’s committee found a way to ignore it.
So inexcusably wrongheaded was their thinking that they even
violated Alfred Nobel’s will, which states that the
prize in medicine must be awarded only for “discovery.”
He does not allow, as he does
in chemistry and physics, for techniques or inventions that
exploit a discovery, such as Lauterbur and Mansfield contributed
– and techniques or inventions are the only thing being
honored this year.
What’s going on here? Distasteful as it may be to face,
the decision is a vicious attempt by Nobel insiders and chummy
research scientists to rewrite history, that is, to rob a
great American medical doctor of his life’s work –
his nearly universally recognized and lauded identity –
and transfer it to two research scientists they find more
to their liking. Such a flagrant injustice simply cannot be
allowed. (If you hear of a scientist who downplays the foundational
significance of Dr. Damadian’s discoveries, ask yourself
if he is a research Ph. D. scandalously defending his own
kind or a medical doctor dispassionately citing facts.)
THE SWEDISH PEOPLE AS THE CONSCIENCE OF THE
NOBEL PRIZE
We have appealed to the Nobel Committee for Physiology or
Medicine to right the shameful wrong of Dr. Damadian’s
exclusion. We have appealed to the two winners to step forward
out of respect for the truth of science.
At this time, we turn to the Swedish people, who take such
great national pride in the Nobel Prize. How can you allow
this year’s Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine
to shame the award by this blatant affront to the history
of science?
Three winners can be named for the Nobel Prize
in Medicine
We ask you to let your voices be heard as the true conscience
of the Nobel Prize. We ask you to insist that the long-honored
history of the discovery of the MRI and the wording of Alfred
Nobel’s will be respected above all other considerations.
We ask you to stand up for the simple truth and for a wronged
inventor, whose seminal discoveries have benefited and continue
to benefit many thousands of people around the world every
day. We ask you to insist that Raymond V. Damadian, M. D.,
be included in this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine
– insist until your voices cannot be ignored, insist
because you know that righting this shameful wrong is the
only way, the “noble” way, to preserve the prestige
of the Nobel Prize, in which, we know, you take great national
pride.
We also ask that concerned people everywhere join in the
expression of worldwide outrage that this shameful wrong has
provoked.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
In addition to making the original discoveries
on which all MRI’s are based (T1 and T2 tissue relaxations),
Dr. Damadian built the first MRI by hand, performed history’s
first MRI full-body scan, invented the first Open MRI, the
first mobile MRI, and now the first Stand-UpTM MRI.
1. Cambridge University Press, 2003
2. A Machine Called Indomitable, by New York Times
reporter Sonny Kleinfield, Times Books, Inc., 1985
3. Actually, Leon Saryan
4. Lauterbur’s handwritten note can be seen at www.fonar.com
5. Quote from the Court’s decision. Interpretation from
Fonar company archives.
Paid for by The Friends of Raymond Damadian.
Contact DanielCulver@aol.com
or call him at 631-694-2929.
All facts are public record. Details available on request.
Insist that this shameful wrong be righted,
now.
HOW YOU CAN HELP RIGHT THIS SHAMEFUL WRONG
TO: The Nobel Prize Committee for Physiology or Medicine
Dear Members of the Nobel Committee:
The TRUTH must have a place. I/we Believe this year’s
Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine should include Dr.
Raymond Damadian.
Name______________________________________________
Address_______________________________City______________
State_________________________ Zip______________
Mail to:
The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, Nobel Forum,
Box 270 SE-171
77 Stockholm, Sweden
E-Mail To: secr@mednobel.ki.se
Or call the Committee at 011-46-8-585-823-44
011-46-8-662-64-31
011-46-8-51-77-45-00
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