Raymond Damadian

[Arpa]

http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsA-H...H/damadian.html

[MosJan]

http://web.mit.edu/invent/www/inventorsA-H/damadianbar.gif%201

 

RAYMOND V. DAMADIAN

 

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)

 

Raymond V. Damadian, inventor of the method known today as magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, was born in Forest Hills, New York in 1936. He studied violin at the Julliard School of Music in New York for eight years before winning a scholarship, at age 16, to the University of Wisconsin. There he received a BS in mathematics in 1956 and then turned to medicine, earning an MD in 1960 from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY).

After his internship, residency, and Fellowships at Washington University and Harvard, Dr. Damadian served for some time in the Air Force, then joined the faculty of SUNY Downstate Medical Center. There, his research into sodium and potassium in living cells led him to his first experiments with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) which caused him to first propose the MR body scanner in 1969.

 

NMR, the phenomenon of atomic nuclei emitting radio waves at predictable frequencies when exposed to a powerful magnetic field, had been used during and after World War II to probe the composition of various substances. Damadian invented an apparatus and method to use NMR safely and accurately to scan the human body, a method now well known as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

 

Experimenting on rats, Damadian discovered dramatic differences in the quality and duration of NMR signals emitted by cancerous versus healthy tissues that confirmed his idea of the MR body scanner. His 1971 paper, "Tumor Detection by Magnetic Resonance," was met with skepticism from the scientific community, but Damadian forged ahead, filing the first of his patents for an MRI scanner the next year. The scanner used liquid helium to supercool magnets in the walls of a cylindrical chamber; the nuclei of hydrogen atoms in the water, which all cells contain, reacted to the resultant magnetic field, and a three-dimensional spatial localization method coordinated the signals into the scan.

 

Damadian spent the next years working with teams of graduate students to make his scanner a reality. Meanwhile, many scientists had decided that Damadian's ideas were not so misguided after all and began to compete to develop the first workable scanner. Finally, in 1977, Damadian's team produced the first MRI scan of the human body, using a prototype device he called "Indomitable" (now installed in the Smithsonian Institution).

 

The first MRI scan provided a clear image of the heart, lungs and chest wall with no side effects. Today, MRI scanners can instantly map and analyze any part of the human body in minute detail, allowing visual diagnosis of virtually any medical condition, from strained muscles to tumors. They can also provide the chemical composition of the tissue being scanned.

 

In 1978, Damadian formed a company, FONAR Corporation (from "Field fOcused Nuclear mAgnetic Resonance"), which produced the first commercial scanner in 1980. Later the company developed the first FDA-approved, first mobile, and first whole-body MR scanners. FONAR's patented Iron Circuit™ technology has enabled the company to develop seven different MRI products including the recently cleared-for-marketing FONAR 360°, a full-size room with two circular structures (the poles of the magnet) projecting from the ceiling and the floor. There are no obstructions between the patient and the walls of the scanner room, and the patient is accessible from any direction. Damadian is also working on the Stand-Up MRI™, the only scanner that allows MRI patients to be scanned while standing up.

 

Damadian continues to direct FONAR's scientific and financial progress, as Chairman and President. He has earned over 40 patents, as well as the 2001 Lemelson-MIT Program's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Medal of Technology (1988), and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (1989).

[Sip]

Wow that so awesome! Actually I was talking yesterday to my brother about what an amazing invention MRI is ... but neither of us had any idea about this!

[TigrannesIII]

oo-rah-rah-wis-kahn-sin!!! praise to thee our alma mater.......

[Arpa]

I had the pleasure of running into Dr. Damadian some years ago. Needless to say, it was at an Armenian affair. What surprised me, aside from his fame of a first class scientist, was that he is also a devout Christian, a motivational speaker, an unordained pastor, yet above all, he is also an abashed Armenian. He may, by the definition of some of us, be an assimilated American but in no way is he alienated. He opens every one of his (scientific) presentations with a prayer and an inspirational devotion.

To see why, click below.

Note: There are numerous references to him on the internet. You may use key words as; Damadian MRI, Damadian chrsitian and Damadian Armenian, or just plain Damadian.

 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/cr/7r1/7r1062.html

[Sip]

Talk about a paragraph that I never even imagined seeing. He is really a strange one!!! I think I now understand what they mean by a paradox wrapped in an enigma served in the form of a riddle (or something like that).

[MosJan]

es mardu masin kardalov - 4" boyovatsa

[Sip]

 

 

 

Amot Amot Amot ... es inch baner es asum Movses?

[MosJan]

Seaphan jan isk duq inchu eq etter nayum ???

 

bayst te shat pisn es ha - mard ban chasi vraz du & Haorut@ mi ban k@gtneq -

 

el cheq asum vro invalid mard em -

[Twilight Bark]

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet on Monday awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2003 jointly to Paul C Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

 

Thus, Raymond Damadian received what is in technical jargon called "the middle finger". It would be mildly interesting to know the politics involved.

[Twilight Bark]

Here is a link that explains some of the controversy that most will consider now resolved:

 

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110001844

[Teutonic Knight]

No wonder they snatched the award from him, I wonder who's behind that decision

 

Are there any Armenian Nobel prize winners?

[Sip]

That's pretty ****ed up. At times like this, you really start to wonder about the "scientific community".

[nairi]

Are there any Armenian Nobel prize winners?

Are there any Armenian Nobel prizes?

 

I'm patiently waiting for Sip to be the first

[Azat]

TB, I read that this morning prior to getting to work and was flabbergasted how he was not mentioned anywhere. Too sad for him as he really is the one who took the Nuclear MRI technology that was being used for chemistry and applied it to medicine.

[Sip]

I'm patiently waiting for Sip to be the first

he he hehehehe hhahahaaaaa hahahahaha ... love the use of the word "patiently" there. I'll probably win an Oscar or an emmy before a Nobel ...

[Azat]

Are there any Armenian Nobel prizes?

 

I'm patiently waiting for Sip to be the first

I second that. We know we are in the surroundings of a Genius whom the world has not recognized.

[Teutonic Knight]

That's pretty ****ed up. At times like this, you really start to wonder about the "scientific community".

It's a community alright. Just not scientific.

[790]

was he also the one who coined the term, MRI ?

[gamavor]

Prize Eludes LI MRI Developer

 

Newsday (New York)

October 7, 2003

 

By Richard J. Dalton Jr., Staff Writer

 

Eight years after publishing a scientific article in 1971 on how

magnetic imaging could tell the difference between normal cells and

cancerous ones, Dr. Raymond Damadian started a company called Fonar to

develop and sell MRI scanners.

 

Even though the technology has helped revolutionize medical diagnostics,

it hasn't necessarily helped the bottom line of the Melville-based

company regardless of who gets credit for the discovery of the technology.

 

Fonar, which competes with giants including General Electric, Siemens,

Philips, Hitachi and Toshiba, suffered a net loss of $15 million on

revenues of $52.9 million in fiscal 2003.

 

But some of its 84 patents have proved profitable. In 1997, Fonar

received $128.7 million from General Electric for patent infringement.

Many other companies that use MRI technology had already settled Fonar's

patent infringement claims.

 

Some of Fonar's patents have expired, but the company has now focused on

new technologies, including the stand-up MRI, which sells for $1.5

million. The stand-up MRI allows patients to stand, bend, sit or lie at

an angle, helping doctors detect symptoms that might only be visible in

a certain position, such as a slipped disk.

 

Even last month, Damadian was still receiving patents related to

magnetic resonance imaging. On Sept. 16, he was among the inventors

listed in a patent granted for an open-entry MRI scanner to provide

easier access to the patient.

 

Yesterday his rivals, Paul Lauterbur, from the United States, and Peter

Mansfield, from the United Kingdom, were awarded the Nobel prize in

medicine for work on the MRI.

 

But in a 1971 article published in the journal Science, Damadian showed

that cancer cells and normal cells would emit different magnetic

resonance signals, an important discovery that brought magnetic

resonance technology from a tool of chemists to a tool of physicians.

 

"Before that, no one knew there would be any of this difference," said

Daniel Culver, spokesman for Fonar Corp. Damadian and colleagues are

also credited with creating the first magnetic resonance image of a

body. But Fonar's MRI machines now use Lauterbur's technology.

 

Damadian, 67, who was not available for comment, also coined the acronym

MR (magnetic resonance) and FONAR, from "Field fOcused Nuclear mAgnetic

Resonance."

 

In 1978, he founded Fonar Corp., and now serves as president, chief

executive and treasurer of the company. Whoever deserves credit for the

modern MRI, the device is clearly a breakthrough, allowing non-invasive

examination of the body.

 

Each year, more than 60 million MRI scans are conducted worldwide. MRI

scans have transformed the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

 

And the scans are especially useful for examining the brain and spinal

cord abnormalities, including inflammation due to multiple sclerosis.

 

"From a neurologist's point of view, I don't think we want to look at

images unless there is the level of quality of MRI," said Dr. Jerry

Wolinsky, a Bartels Family Professor of Neurology at The University of

Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

 

 

http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-bzmr...y-top-headlines

 

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PS: How about registering the patents and trademarks in Republic of Armenia and in US and then bringing the law suits for intelectual property infringement.

[Stormig]

http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20031008/06

 

 

Not winning the NobelRaymond Damadian was conspicuously absent from the medicine prize awardees | By Stephen Pincock

 

 

 

Handing out prizes for scientific achievements is, by its nature, a controversial business. More often than not, assigning credit to an individual for an invention or breakthrough means leaving out others who played an important part.

 

When the award is as prestigious as a Nobel Prize, the stakes are clearly higher than ever. And in the case of this year's prize for physiology or medicine, given to scientists who played a part in developing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the controversy had already been boiling for years.

 

That's because the claim of “inventing” MRI has long been the subject of a dispute, largely centering around two US researchers—Paul C. Lauterbur, who jointly won the 2003 prize, and Raymond Damadian, who did not.

 

The debate over these two men's place in history has been a regular topic of discussion at scientific meetings. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal published a report suggesting that the awarding of a Nobel Prize for MRI had been held up because of the dispute.

 

“What bothers me,” Nicolaas Bloembergen, the 1981 Nobel laureate in physics, told the Journal's Cameron Stracher, “is that the institute in Stockholm has not yet awarded the prize for this great discovery. I believe this is partly due to controversy over Damadian's role.”

 

Damadian, a physician born in Queens, NY, was unquestionably a pioneer in the application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in medicine, conducting key work on tumors in rats in the early 1970s that predated the experiments by Lauterbur and his co-awardee Peter Mansfield that garnered them this year's prize.

 

In 1972, he filed a patent application for using nuclear magnetic resonance to scan for cancerous tissue in the human body, which was subsequently awarded. His group was also the first to build an MRI scanner.

 

In 1988, Lauterbur and Damadian were jointly awarded the US National Medal of Technology for their independent contributions to the field. Any number of Web sites list Damadian as the “inventor” of MRI. He has also been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

 

Last year, at least, Damadian felt that credit for inventing the MRI should go to “me, and then Lauterbur,” which he was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal piece. “If I had not been born, would MRI have existed? I don't think so. If Lauterbur had not been born? I would have gotten there. Eventually.”

 

So why did the Nobel committee disagree? Primarily, some leading scientists say, because the approach to scanning first proposed by Damadian was surpassed by a technique using gradients in the magnetic field developed by Lauterbur and Mansfield.

 

An article from the National Academy of Sciences' Beyond Discovery Web site sums up this argument: “An essential technical advance that opened up the ensuing widespread application of NMR to produce useful images was due to chemist Paul Lauterbur, who was then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1971, he watched a chemist named Leon Saryan repeat Damadian's experiments with tumors and healthy tissues from rats. Lauterbur concluded that the technique was insufficiently informative for locating and diagnosing tumors and went on to devise a practical way to use NMR to make images,” it says.

 

To put it another way: “The actual implementation of MRI probably better goes to Lauterbur, but the use of MRI for medical problems—I think Damadian deserves some credit for that,” one senior Canadian NMR researcher told The Scientist.

 

Supporters of Damadian feel that recognition should have come in the form of the Nobel. "Arguably, Raymond Damadian...played at least as much a role in the development of medical MRI as did this year's two winners," one physician told The Scientist.

 

What all this illustrates, says another prominent Canadian researcher R. Mark Henkelman, professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, is the difficulty of pinpointing the eureka moment in scientific endeavor.

 

“This is probably one of the hardest prizes, as making MRI a reality in the medical domain involved many, many people,” he told The Scientist. “It's very hard to go back to the beginning and stick your finger on one guy with one bright idea.”

 

Nevertheless, Henkelman thinks the Nobel committee did the right thing. “I think he [Damadian] had a real insight on NMR and cancer and that there might be differences in tissue with pathology that might show up with magnetic resonance, but that's not what this prize is given for, the prize is given for MR imaging and that really belongs to the other two people.”

 

Damadian was contacted for this article, but did not comment by the time of publication.

 

Richard Ernst, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, takes a philosophical view on the whole thing.

 

“It's not a very pleasant issue,” he told The Scientist. “There are always arguments about who deserved it most. You have to just live with the facts and the reality and accept your fate.”

 

Links for this article

H. Cohen, “But what about the others?” The Scientist, 16:20, October 28, 2002.

http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2002/oct/co...p20_021028.html

 

Nobel e-Museum

http://www.nobel.se

 

S. Pincock, “MRI scientists win Nobel prize,” The Scientist, October 6, 2003.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20031006/06

 

OpinionJournal, from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110001844

 

Nicolaas Bloembergen, Nobel Prize in Physics 1981

http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1981/index.html

 

Technology Administration National Medal of Technology

http://www.technology.gov/medal/

 

National Inventors Hall of Fame

http://www.invent.org/index.asp

 

Beyond Discovery

http://www.beyonddiscovery.org/content/vie....page.asp?I=134

 

R. Mark Henkelman

http://medbio.utoronto.ca/faculty/henkelman.html

 

Richard Ernst, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1991

http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/19...1991/index.html

[gamavor]

In another Armenian Forum there was a short comment - "Bunch of thieves!"

Forget about US, forget about Europe. Good is what is good for Armenia.

Take the money and run!

[Stormig]

washingtonpost.com

In a Funk Over the No-Nobel Prize

Overlooked MRI Pioneer Lobbies Against Decision

 

By David Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 10, 2003; Page C01

 

 

As the Nobels have been unveiled all week, reporters have been calling up laureates every day and asking where they were when they heard the news, and how does it feel to be a winner. But what about the losers? Where were they and how did it feel?

 

Raymond Damadian was at his computer at home on Long Island at 5:30 Monday morning, logging on to the Nobel Foundation Web site. This was the precise moment when the prize for medicine was to be announced. And there it was: He immediately saw that the work being honored was magnetic resonance imaging -- MRI -- his field! He knew from colleagues that he had been nominated for the prize this year, and several previous years.

 

He checked the names of the winners.

 

"I went from my computer into my bedroom," Damadian said yesterday. "My wife said, 'What happened?' I said they gave it to [Paul C.] Lauterbur and [sir Peter] Mansfield and they left me out."

 

How did that moment feel?

 

A pause.

 

"Agony," he recalled. "I know the outcome of this is to be written out of history altogether."

 

He tuned out the inevitable media reports of Lauterbur and Mansfield savoring their own personal leaps into history. "It was too much for me to bear."

 

But unlike most Nobel also-rans, Damadian is not giving up so easily. Yesterday his MRI manufacturing company on Long Island, Fonar Corp., took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post headlined "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted."

 

It quoted scientists saying he was robbed. It quoted textbooks attesting to his contribution to the now ubiquitous technology -- 60 million MRI exams were given last year -- that employs high-powered magnets and radio waves to produce images of soft tissue inside the body that once was invisible to doctors unless they cut open the patient.

 

The ad charged that "inexcusable disregard for the truth has led the [Nobel] committee to make a decision that is simply outrageous," and it provided a clip-out form for supporters to mail protests directly to the Nobel arbiters in Stockholm.

 

Such ads in the Post typically cost just over $80,000, and Damadian said he will place more in other newspapers.

 

It's one physician-inventor's campaign to get his name added to the award for medicine before it is officially presented later this year.

 

"I know that had I never been born, there would be no MRI today," Damadian said.

 

Nobel selections often result in jealousy and hurt feelings, but a public crusade is rare.

 

"Usually they don't advertise and usually they don't ask everyone to write us," said Hans Jornvall, secretary of the 50-member Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, which picks the winner in medicine, speaking from Sweden.

 

He said Nobel officials never comment on Nobel Prize losers.

 

"To us," he said, "mankind is divided into two groups of people: those who have got the award and those who have still not got it. . . . The ones who have still not got it we don't say anything about."

 

Of those who got it, Lauterbur -- at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- and Mansfield -- at the University of Nottingham -- Jornvall said: "We think they are excellent laureates."

 

The Nobel Assembly's statement on the winners said Lauterbur and Mansfield "made seminal discoveries" that "led to the development of modern magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which represents a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research."

 

Scientists in the MRI community are not totally surprised by Damadian's protest. Some said Damadian has always been bold in seeking recognition and has pined for a Nobel Prize. But there are varying views in the scientific community about the proper distribution of credit for developing MRI.

 

"We are perplexed, disappointed and angry about the incomprehensible exclusion" of Damadian from the prize, said Eugene Feigelson, dean of the college of medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, where Damadian did his work related to MRI. "MRI's entire development rests on the shoulders of Damadian's discovery. . . . "

 

Damadian's discovery, beginning with experiments in 1969, was that cancerous and normal tissue could be distinguished using a precursor technology then known as nuclear magnetic resonance. In 1977 he developed a scanning machine, called "Indomitable," now owned by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and on loan to an inventors' hall of fame in Ohio.

 

Working separately in subsequent years, Lauterbur and Mansfield developed more sophisticated methods to capture images of tissue that were clearer, quicker and easier to use.

 

"In my opinion, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield deserve the Nobel Prize," said Alex Pines, an expert in nuclear magnetic resonance at the University of California at Berkeley. "In a leap of creative genius, they came up with the gradient imaging methodology that forms the basis for what today is known as MRI."

 

Damadian's camp characterizes Lauterbur's and Mansfield's work as technological refinements of Damadian's central insight, while the Nobel Assembly and other scientists say Lauterbur's and Mansfield's breakthroughs were "discoveries" in their own right. The documentation that the assembly used to choose Lauterbur and Mansfield -- and exclude anyone else -- will remain secret for 50 years, under Nobel rules, Jornvall said.

 

Mansfield could not be reached for comment, and Lauterbur said through his wife that he preferred not to comment on Damadian's claims.

 

Damadian, 67, grew up in Queens and became a varsity tennis player and an accomplished violinist before getting a medical degree. When he was a boy, his grandmother was dying of cancer in the family's home, and her moans kept him awake at night. Later, as a specialist in internal medicine, he was frustrated that patients could have cancers that were undetectable -- and, doing research with mouse tumors and magnets, he hit on his big idea.

 

He knows his campaign to get a Nobel this year may be a long shot. Once winners have been announced, the assembly never changes its mind, according to Jornvall.

 

But Damadian says the battle is bigger than he is. In his view, the Nobel Assembly has become the great arbiter of who goes down in the annals of medicine -- yet its judgments are accountable to no one and not subject to appeal.

 

His campaign is on behalf of all the losers history might forget.

 

Staff writer Rick Weiss contributed to this report.

 

 

 

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Azat]

Nobel Prize Fighter

A man on a mission to get share of MRI credit

 

 

 

 

 

By James Bernstein, Mark Harrington and Earl Lane

STAFF WRITERS

 

October 21, 2003

 

The daily prayer service at FONAR Corp. begins at 9 o'clock to strains of the national anthem. And as they have on weekday mornings for the past decade, a group of FONAR workers and executives head to a small area of a shop floor.

 

For the next 20 minutes, about 15 people listen as FONAR's human resources director, Fred Peipman, reads Scripture and gives thanks.

 

"We thank you for Dr. Damadian and his invention and the bread it puts on our tables," Peipman says in closing, referring to FONAR's chairman and founder, Raymond Damadian, an inventor who realized that a phenomenon called magnetic resonance could be useful in scanning tissue for signs of cancer.

 

It may be an article of faith at the Melville medical technology company that their founder created the MRI scanner. But that's not how it was for the Nobel committee that recently ignored Damadian when it handed out honors for development of the machine.

 

And now FONAR's leader - a man full of strong opinions and contradictions - is on a crusade to make his case.

 

The 67-year-old, white-haired Damadian is a multimillionaire, but still lives in a colonial in Woodbury he bought decades ago. He is a trained physician, but favors a theory of creationism over evolution. Though CEO of the company, Damadian's salary is $85,000 and he takes no bonus - and says he will not until the company turns a profit.

 

And while Damadian's career and company is built around his pioneering work with the MRI, he has been unable to persuade the scientific community that he deserved a Nobel prize to secure his place in medical history.

 

Hans Jornvall, secretary of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden that selects the winners of the prize for medicine, said Damadian's actions are unusual. While the assembly has received critical comments on past awards, he said, "I have never seen large-scale advertisements against us before," Jornvall said. The prize decision is final, he said, and based on a careful review of the scientific literature.

 

"Once we have taken a vote, we have taken a vote," Jornvall said.

 

And that vote awarded the prize to two others, including a man Damadian has considered a nemesis for the past 30 years, Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois. Lauterbur did his prize-winning work while he was at Stony Brook University. The other winner was British citizen Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham. It's a decision that most in the scientific community think is correct based on the scientific facts, according to several specialists.

 

But on Oct. 9 Damadian took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post, followed the next day by ads in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, blasting the Nobel committee for not giving him a share of the $1.3 million prize for medicine. The ads, which showed an inverted Nobel prize medal, accused the committee of "attempting to rewrite history." The ads asked the public to petition the committee to include him in the prize. Full-page ads ran again yesterday in the New York Times and in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's second-largest morning newspaper.

 

Many scientists and others have protested Nobel awards in the 100 years the prizes have been issued, but Damadian's actions were considered audacious by almost any measure.

 

But then again, Damadian has spent much of his professional life rubbing colleagues the wrong way.

 

"Damadian deserved to be considered" for the Nobel, said Stephen Thomas, a past president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. But Thomas, who assumes the Nobel committee did its homework, added that regarding Damadian: "From the point of view of personality, he hasn't pushed his position in what would be considered, in my view, a logical way. He's always been at odds with the field."

 

Damadian has never shied away from the limelight, his friends say. The recent controversy he has generated in the medical and scientific community has seemed only to add spark to his step.

 

On a recent afternoon, Damadian strode briskly into the Sweet Hollow Diner in Melville with all the rumpled glamour of an aging prize fighter, his trademark white mane and mustache turning heads, either from vague recognition or the mistaken sense that he is bull-charging them. Holding a cup of coffee he has carried from his office, he nods genially when the smiling proprietor says he has seen him in the papers again. Damadian tucks himself into a corner booth and continues a monologue that never faltered.

 

When the waitress asks what he'll drink, he says, "corned-beef sandwich." Later, still speaking, he holds the sandwich like a pointer or a stick of chalk, and a large piece of corned beef swings at the bottom of his sandwich but it never falls off.

 

The short car ride with a reporter had been something of a journey, Damadian recounting in striking detail the events that led to the rescue of his young Armenian father from the slaughter by the Turks in the Syrian desert during World War I. He remembered not only the names of the specific sections of desert where the shattered family was marched, but the spelling of them, veering out of his lane in his weathered white Continental as he turned to a listener to make a point more emphatic.

 

The feistiness comes through in the current fight. "There isn't anybody out there who wouldn't give me credit for challenging the establishment," Damadian said the other day in an interview in a cluttered FONAR conference room, a smile crossing his face.

 

"I've always had to withstand the brickbats," said Damadian.

 

A Child Prodigy

 

Damadian has long stood out from his friends and classmates, often taking unpredictable paths.

 

The son of musical parents, Damadian studied violin at Juilliard for nearly a decade but did not pursue it as a career.

 

Charlie Brukl, who met Damadian when both were young tennis-playing teenagers growing up in Forest Hills and who is now FONAR's director of materials research, said his friend was always a top student with a serious demeanor.

 

Damadian graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and later joined the faculty of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

 

"He has a determination to succeed beyond and above anybody else I've known in the science and medical community," said Brukl. "If he gets an idea, he rarely lets anyone tell him it can't be done."

 

People who know Damadian say he is complex, often seemingly contradictory.

 

A trained scientist, Damadian believes the world is only 6,000 years old and debunks the theory of evolution.

 

"We are asked to believe all modern life oozed out of the bottom of the sea," Damadian said, warming up to one of his favorite subjects - how the world began. "That's preposterous."

 

An intensely religious Protestant, Damadian is nonetheless anything but humble. On that issue, Damadian quotes Edmund Burke, the 18th century Scottish philosopher and British parliamentarian, who said, "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing."

 

By this, Damadian means he could not sit back and allow the Nobel committee to exclude him.

 

"I'm focused on not being written out of history," Damadian said the other day. "Otherwise, every textbook from here on out will say the MRI was invented by Lauterbur and Mansfield."

 

And preventing that has become the passion of his life these days, even though Damadian readily concedes there is virtually no chance the Nobel committee will reverse itself and add his name alongside the two others who won this year for medicine.

 

In fact, he says, he no longer wants a Nobel prize.

 

"The Nobel prize now has a corrupt significance to me," Damadian said. "It has the stain of Cain on it."

 

He just wants to let the world know that, according to Damadian and his supporters, he played a key and pivotal role in developing MRI technology, and that he should not be forgotten by history.

 

Diatribe at a Meeting

 

In 1969 while at Downstate, Damadian had an opportunity to use a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer in his biophysics research. He got an idea to build an NMR large enough to scan the human body, so it could detect cancer cells.

 

In 1971, he published a paper in the journal Science on experiments with lab rats showing that NMR signals from cancerous tissue differed from those of normal tissue.

 

In medical usage, the MRI technique takes advantage of the fact that the human body, by weight, is about two-thirds water. When the body is exposed to a strong magnetic field, the hydrogen nuclei in the water orient themselves. When submitted to a pulse of radio waves, the energy content of the nuclei changes and as they relax to their previous states, a resonance wave is emitted.

 

Summaries of the history of MRI typically cite Damadian's early role in recognizing that magnetic resonance could be used in medical diagnosis on body tissues. Damadian's supporters maintain that from that insight, all future developments in MRI flow. But many scientists say that Lauterbur and Mansfield made the conceptual advances that permitted the development of the MRI machines now used around the world.

 

Damadian, who was awarded a patent on Feb. 5, 1974, for an "Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in Tissue," pursued commercialization of MRI on his own, while Lauterbur was unable to persuade officials of the State University of New York system to apply for a patent based on his early imaging research.

 

For many MRI specialists, Damadian has long been a controversial figure whose difficult personality and categorical statements regarding his contributions have alienated colleagues who might otherwise feel more sympathy regarding his exclusion from the Nobel prize.

 

"As I look back, if Dr. Damadian hadn't been so vitriolic in his attacks on other people, I would have argued that he deserved to be included" in the prize, said Dr. Gary Fullerton, an MRI specialist at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. "He created this situation himself."

 

Fullerton, founding editor of "The Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging," recalled a scientific meeting in London in 1985. "There was a conscious effort on the part of the Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine to pull Dr. Damadian back into the fold," Fullerton said.

 

Ian Young, a British MRI expert who was a local organizer of the meeting, said Damadian "had promised he would behave himself" while serving as moderator of a key session with several hundred scientists in attendance. Instead, Young said, Damadian "started giving this diatribe" against Lauterbur.

 

"People were absolutely shocked that he did it," Fullerton said. "That sort of behavior really doesn't set well with scientists." Lauterbur declined to discuss any matters involving Damadian.

 

Dr. David Stark, a radiologist at Downstate, who is a strong backer of Damadian, said his behavior at the London meeting was "inappropriate." But Stark said Damadian deserved recognition by the Nobel committee, whatever his relations with other researchers. "For just being a clumsy, pushy New Yorker, he was screwed," Stark said.

 

Damadian took on corporations as well as the scientific community, filing patent infringement lawsuits against companies he felt were stealing his ideas. One judgment, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1997, ordered General Electric to pay Damadian $128.7 million.

 

Damadian said that all of the money from that and other suits has been put back into the company for research and development purposes. Damadian is FONAR's largest shareholder, with about 8 percent of the company's stock. His stock holdings amount to about $6.5 million. Damadian said he also receives "a few hundred thousand dollars" of income a year from the 15 scanning centers he has established around the country.

 

In the patent case, some experts questioned whether the courts fully understood some of the technical issues being argued.

 

Damadian points to such rulings as buttressing his arguments, but others are dismissive.

 

"Scientists don't go around looking for information in patent literature," said Paul Bottomley, an MRI expert at Johns Hopkins University who has worked with Mansfield. "Scientists look at journals."

 

Weighing the Competing Claims

 

Thomas, the past president of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine who is also an MRI expert at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, said Damadian's 1971 paper in the journal Science "really sort of laid the groundwork for using magnetic resonance parameters in diagnosis."

 

Other scientists already had showed that when atomic nuclei subjected to a magnetic field return to their previous energy levels, their "relaxation" times can be measured in two forms, dubbed T1 and T2, that can give information on the structure of the sample.

 

Damadian devised a way of using the T1 and T2 measurements to detect cancerous tissue in the body. He surgically removed fast-growing tumors from lab rats and showed that their signals differed from those of normal tissue.

 

"Damadian's main contribution was to observe that one nuclear magnetic resonance property, relaxation time, was elevated in cancerous tissue compared to normal tissue," Bottomley said.

 

But several specialists said Damadian's original work had some flaws. As it later turned out, relaxation rates are not a reliable indicator of cancer.

 

"He made the statement you could distinguish cancer because it has longer relaxation times," Fullerton said. "That's very non-specific. ... Tumors do cause that, but other infections and diseases do the same thing."

 

And Damadian's design for a scanner used a point-by-point method that proved cumbersome and did not produce useful images. "Damadian had a single spot he was moving the sample through," Bottomley said.

 

Lauterbur realized he could subject the atomic nuclei to a second, weaker magnetic field along with the first field to produce what is called a magnetic field gradient. That gradient, varying in intensity at different points in the sample, served as the basis for the MRI machines used in medical practice, including even those manufactured by Damadian's own company, experts said. Mansfield further developed the gradient method, showing how the signals could be mathematically analyzed to produce two-dimensional slices of the human body. He also showed how to greatly speed up the imaging process.

 

Several experts said the Nobel committee made the right decision in awarding the prize only to Lauterbur and Mansfield. "There is a real issue," said one longtime MRI specialist who asked not to be identified because he did not want to tangle publicly with Damadian. "The issue is whether Damadian is correct" in challenging the prize committee.

 

"The fact that he is obnoxious or aggressive, that doesn't make him unique. The fact that he's in industry rather than academia, that's not the issue. The issue is did the Nobel prize committee fail to include a person whose scientific discoveries were essential to the invention being honored? I think the answer to that is very clear. If what you are trying to honor is the workable imaging machines which are used around the world and have a big role in medicine, it is appropriate to honor the invention which makes it possible. That is the field gradient." Said Bottomley: "Most of the scientists in the field would recognize that the award was correct."

 

Bottomley and others argue that Lauterbur and Mansfield made the fundamental advances that turned MRI into a practical method now widely used in medicine. "The prize was given for the development of MRI imaging in its present form," Young said. "Raymond contributed nothing to that at all."

 

Thomas dismissed Damadian's comment to one reporter that if he had not been born, MRI would not exist today. "Nobody is indispensable," Thomas said. "People were working with magnetic resonance in biology before he picked it up."

 

John Throck Watson, a professor of biochemistry at Michigan State University, said Damadian deserved recognition for making discoveries that spurred the subsequent development of practical imaging devices. He said the Nobel committee had an opportunity to include him, since a prize can be awarded to as many as three people.

 

Young said the Damadian-inspired controversy may have led the Nobel committee to delay the prize for MRI longer than some specialists had anticipated. "We all put it down to the fact that the committee was aware it was going to be very hard to make an award that would be accepted without a row," Young said. Even if Damadian had won the prize, he said, "I don't think it would have shut Raymond up."

 

Damadian says that he intends to remain active in the field of medical research, and envisions a day when MRI scanners will be the size of living rooms, allowing doctors to produce large-scale, detailed pictures of the insides of the human body.

 

"The direction I get from my prayers is to stay the course," Damadian said. "I feel I would be disobeying if I didn't."

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.

[Stormig]

http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2003/nov/lc...ile_031103.html Edited November 3, 2003 by Stormy