Raymond Damadian

[Twilight Bark]

I recently came across a book by Donald P. Hollis about the Damadian saga. He describes, in murderous detail, what Damadian has done, and has not done. It is a thoroughly convincing account, and an amusing read. After reading that well-researched book by someone close to the "action", it is hard to regard Damadian as anything more than a pathetic figure, which he apparently has been. At this point there is very little doubt in my mind that Damadian, as a scientist, was worse than mediocre, and the Nobel committee had done its homework well. Damadian's lack of a Nobel prize has nothing to do with his religious beliefs or being a jerk. He simply did not do anything scientifically or technologically significant, or even valid, as far as MRI imaging is concerned.

[Sip]

That's blaspheme ... Armenians were the first to introduce MRI in the world

[DominO123]

I recently came across a book by Donald P. Hollis about the Damadian saga.  He describes, in murderous detail, what Damadian has done, and has not done.  It is a thoroughly convincing account, and an amusing read.  After reading that well-researched book by someone close to the "action", it is hard to regard Damadian as anything more than a pathetic figure, which he apparently has been.  At this point there is very little doubt in my mind that Damadian, as a scientist, was worse than mediocre, and the Nobel committee had done its homework well.  Damadian's lack of a Nobel prize has nothing to do with his religious beliefs or being a jerk.  He simply did not do anything scientifically or technologically significant, or even valid, as far as MRI imaging is concerned.

TB, I just missed that post of yours. Were you reffering to the "Abusing Cancer Science: The Truth About NMR and Cancer" ? If it is that one, I am really skeptical of the way Hollis put it, as if you consider it as only the source of informations, you're taking the words of one team against the other. (Hollis team was competing with Damadians one).

 

In any instance, if we take Laurberbur words(which one, as he contradicted himself so many times regarding whom was the causes of his first discovery), that his work was independent from Damadians one, he's idea still came from another Armenian Leon Saryan(Hollis student) that was repeating Damadians experiment. I don't need to remind you this if the work you were reffering to is the one I reffered above. So Laurberbur was not less arrogant than Damadian in taking the credit.

 

If Damadian didn't worthed the Nobel so as Lauterbur, because the real advencement came from Peter Mansfield, with the 3D imaging. Lauterbur method was one among many 2D attempts that are not used, and there isn't any clear evidences that Peter Mansfield even used Lauterbur studies. The 3 D imaging tool is used as we speak, the cut in slides used presently are so advenced that Lauterbur method is even not needed, while Damadians T1-T2 is used by any MRI.

Edited July 12, 2004 by Fadix

[DominO123]

That's blaspheme ... Armenians were the first to introduce MRI in the world

Yes true Armenian"s," two of them, Saryan and Damadian.

[DominO123]

I forgot to add, where has this method ever used in any MRI machine?

 

http://www.nature.com/physics/lookingback/...r/lauterbur.pdf

 

It was the phase and frequency encoding and the one using the Fourier Transformation(devlopped by Ernest) that was used with the T1-T2 technic and NOT lauterbur one.

Edited July 12, 2004 by Fadix

[DominO123]

Forgot to add that the gradient technic used by Lauterbur was even not devlopped by him but by Carr and Purcell(back in the 50s), it was Herman Y. Carr PhD theses published in 1952. Actually Lauterbur was so good at stealing others work and taking the credit without even actually reffering to the real authors(like he has done when he havn't written Damadians name in his first publications, when asked he claimed there wasn't enought place or he has forgotten).

[Twilight Bark]

TB, I just missed that post of yours. Were you reffering to the "Abusing Cancer Science: The Truth About NMR and Cancer" ? If it is that one, I am really skeptical of the way Hollis put it, as if you consider it as only the source of informations, you're taking the words of one team against the other. (Hollis team was competing with Damadians one).

 

In any instance, if we take Laurberbur words(which one, as he contradicted himself so many times regarding whom was the causes of his first discovery), that his work was independent from Damadians one, he's idea still came from another Armenian   Leon Saryan(Hollis student) that was repeating Damadians experiment. I don't need to remind you this if the work you were reffering to is the one I reffered above. So Laurberbur was not less arrogant than Damadian in taking the credit.

 

If Damadian didn't worthed the Nobel so as Lauterbur, because the real advencement came from Peter Mansfield, with the 3D imaging. Lauterbur method was one among many 2D attempts that are not used, and there isn't any clear evidences that Peter Mansfield even used Lauterbur studies. The 3 D imaging tool is used as we speak, the cut in slides used presently are so advenced that Lauterbur method is even not needed, while Damadians T1-T2 is used by any MRI.

I don't want to spend time and energy to bash an Armenian scientist, however lousy I think he may be. I am surprised that, after reading through Hollis' book you can still defend Damadian as a scientist. If 10% of what Hollis wrote were true (and he has pretty direct evidence for more than that), it would be enough to bump Damadian off the Nobel-class (actually would bump him all the way to the bottom of the barrel).

 

Just a couple of points:

 

* Hollis did not compete with Damadian on imaging, and even if he did, it's irrelevant; he supplies plenty of evidence to show Damadian's scientific and ethical level.

 

* Damadian's lack of understanding of basic NMR is absolutely scary.

[LASaryan]

My name is Leon (Levon) A. Saryan, Ph.D., and I am adding this post because my name has been mentioned on this webpage as one of the two Armenian "inventors" of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). I would like to clarify some facts in this matter for whomever might be interested. By way of background, I would like to mention that I am actively involved in Armenian community affairs, the Armenian Church, and Armenian organizations and have been for many decades, and my love for Armenia, Armenian heritage and culture, and the Armenians is beyond question.

 

Beyond all else, science is a struggle to push back the frontiers of knowledge and a quest for truth. I am a scientist, and have worked continuously in the fields of cancer research and medical science for 35 years. My doctoral research, conducted between 1971 and 1975 in the laboratory of Dr. Donald Hollis at Johns Hopkins, attempted to verify the claim of Dr. Raymond Damadian of New York that MR measurements on biopsy tissues could be used to identify whether that tissue was normal or cancerous. My research demonstrated, I believe conclusively (and this has been confirmed by the passage of time), that Damadian's initial claim was false, not only in small animals such as rats and mice, but more importantly in humans. After I completed my research, Dr. Lauterbur and others developed the concept of differing relaxation times in tissues into a method to produce images of the internal organs of the human body. While Damadian was perhaps the first to observe the relaxation time difference between normal and cancer tissue in rodents, he was not the first to develop a viable, practical, working magnetic resonance human imaging machine, and as a result he did not share the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2003 with Lauterbur and Mansfield for this discovery.

 

Prof. Lauterbur has stated on various occasions that it was experiments he watched me carry out in 1971 (in his lab at New Kensington, PA) that led him to the idea that an image of a body could be created on the basis of MR measurements. Thus I did play a minor role in the discovery of MRI, as did at least a hundred other scientists around the world. I do believe my research was significant in that it helped point others in this field in the right direction, but that is a far cry from the claim that some are making here that I should be considered one of the two Armenian inventors of MRI.

 

Damadian feels that he was slighted by not being included in the prize, and that his contribution will be written out of the historical record. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is my personal belief that Dr. Damadian's contribution, while very important, did not rise to the superlative level required by the Nobel Committee for this award. I believe that the decision to award the Nobel to Lauterbur and Mansfield was the correct one, and I believe it will stand. Most scientists work hard, day in and day out, with no hope of receiving this highest scientific honor, but that in no way demeans the significance and importantce of their contributions to society and mankind.

 

For those who wish to get a balanced view of this controversy, the book "Abusing Cancer Science" by Donald Hollis, is essential reading.

 

Any comments on the above may be addressed directly to me at LASaryan@aol.com.

[Azat]

Dear Levon what a great honor it is to have you as a member of Hyeforum. Welcome to Hye.

 

Thank you for the great explanation of events.

[DominO123]

Welcome to Hyeforum.

 

I would like to clarify few points.

 

-Firstly, you have stated in your post that some here have made the claim that you were one of the two Armenian inventors of the MRI. The only time this was stated(if I am not wrong), it was by me, as an answer to another members sarcastic post, as a joke.

 

I will comment the rest later.

 

Regards

[Yervant1]

http://www.armenianweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/cropped-armenianweeklylogo.png

 

2003 Nobel Prize for MRI Denied to Raymond Vahan Damadian

 

By George B. Kauffman

According to the late Ulf Lagerkvist, a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences who participated in judging nominations for the Chemistry Prize, “It is in the nature of the Nobel Prize that there will always be a number of candidates who obviously deserve to be rewarded but never get the accolade.” Usually, a losing candidate merely accepts the injustice. But in the case of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine of $1.3 million, awarded 10 years ago to University of Illinois Chemist Paul C. Lauterbur (1929-2007) and University of Nottingham (UK) Physicist Sir Peter Mansfield (b. 1933) “for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging,” the undoubtedly deserving candidate, Raymond Vahan Damadian, M.D. (b. 1936), an American of Armenian descent, did not take this injustice lying down.

 

http://www.armenianweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/MRI-FIG.-6-reagan_damadian-1024x792.jpg

President Ronald Reagan presents the National Medal of Technology to Damadian, 1988.

 

A group called “The Friends of Raymond Damadian” protested the denial with full-page advertisements, “The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted” in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Stockholm’s Dagens Nyheter. His exclusion scandalized the scientific community, in general, and the Armenian community, in particular. Damadian correctly claimed that he had invented the MRI and that Lauterbur and Mansfield had merely refined the technology. On Sept. 2, 1971, Lauterbur had acknowledged that he had been inspired by Damadian’s earlier work.

Because Damadian was not included in the award, even though the Nobel statutes permit the award to be made to as many as three living individuals, his omission was clearly deliberate. The possible purported reasons for his rejection have included the fact that he was a physician not an academic scientist; his intensive lobbying for the prize; his supposedly abrasive personality; and his active support of creationism. None of these constitute valid grounds for the denial.

The careful wording of the prize citation reflects the fact that the Nobel laureates did not come up with the idea of applying nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) (the term was later changed to avoid the public’s fear of the word “nuclear,” even though nuclear energy is not involved in the procedure) to medical imaging. Today magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is universally used to image every part of the body and is particularly useful in diagnosing cancer, strokes, brain tumors, multiple sclerosis, torn ligaments, and tendonitis, to name just a few conditions. An MRI scan is the best way to see inside the human body without cutting it open.

 

http://www.armenianweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/MRI-FIG.-2picture-.jpg

‘Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in Tissue,’ U.S. Patent No. 3789832, Feb. 5, 1974.

 

The original idea of applying NMR to medical imaging (MRI) was first proposed by Damadian, a physician, scientist, and an assistant professor of medicine and biophysics at the Downstate Medical Center State University of New York in Brooklyn. Growing up in Forest Hills, N.Y., he attended the Julliard School and became a proficient violinist. When he was still a boy, he lost his grandmother to a slow death by cancer. He vowed to find a way to detect this dreaded disease in its early, still treatable stages.

MRI scanners make use of the fact that body tissue contains lots of water (H₂O), and hence protons (¹H nuclei), which will be aligned in a large magnetic field. Each water molecule contains two protons. When a person is inside the scanner’s powerful magnetic field, the average magnetic moment of many protons becomes aligned with the direction of the field. A radio frequency current is briefly turned on, producing a varying electromagnetic field. This electromagnetic field has just the right frequency, known as the resonance frequency, to be absorbed and flip the spin of the protons in the magnetic field. After the electromagnetic field is turned off, the spins of the protons return to thermodynamic equilibrium and the bulk magnetization becomes realigned with the static magnetic field. During this relaxation, a radio frequency signal (electromagnetic radiation in the RF range) is generated, which can be measured with receiver coils.

Information about the origin of the signal in three-dimensional space can be obtained by applying additional magnetic fields during the scan. These additional magnetic fields can be used to generate detectable signals only from specific locations in the body (spatial excitation) and/or to make magnetization at different spatial locations precess at different frequencies, which enables http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-space_(MRI) encoding of spatial information. The 3D images obtained in MRI can be rotated along arbitrary orientations and manipulated by the doctor to be better able to detect tiny changes of structures within the body. These fields, generated by passing electric currents through gradient coils, make the magnetic field strength vary depending on the position within the magnet. Protons in different tissues return to their equilibrium state at different relaxation rates.

 

http://www.armenianweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/MRI-FIGURE-7-Damadian_medal.jpg

Damadian’s National Medal of Technology, 1988.

 

Using a primitive NMR machine, Damadian found that there was a lag in T₁ and T₂ relaxation times between the electrons of normal and malignant tissues, allowing him to distinguish between normal and cancerous tissue in rats implanted with tumors. In 1971, he published the seminal article for NMR use in organ imaging in the journal Science (“Tumor Detection by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance,” March 19, 1971, vol. 171, pp. 1151-1153). Nevertheless, many individuals in the scientific and NMR community considered his ideas far-fetched, and he had few supporters at this time.

However, Damadian received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1971 to continue his work. He proposed to use whole body scanning by NMR for medical diagnosis in a patent application, “Apparatus and Method for Detecting Cancer in Tissue,” filed on March 17, 1972 (U.S. Patent No. 3789832, issued Feb. 5, 1974). By February 1976, he was able to scan the interior of a live mouse using his FONAR (field focused nuclear magnetic resonance) method.

In 1977, using his machine christened “Indomitable,” now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Damadian tried to scan himself, but the test failed because of his excessive weight. On July 3, 1977, he obtained the first human NMR image—a cross-section of his slender postgraduate assistant Larry Minkoff’s chest, which revealed heart, lungs, vertebræ, and musculature. Minkoff had to be moved over 60 positions with 20-30 signals taken from each position. Congratulatory telegrams poured in from all over the world, including one from Mansfield.

In early 1978, Damadian established the FONAR Corporation in Melville, N.Y., to produce MRI scanners. Later that year he completed his design of the first practical permanent magnet for an MRI scanner, christened “Jonah.” By 1980 his QED 80, the first commercial MRI scanner, was completed.

The MRI imaging industry expanded rapidly with more than a dozen different manufacturers. On Oct. 6, 1997, the Rehnquist U.S. Supreme Court awarded him $128,705,766 from the General Electric Company for infringement of his patent.

Damadian is universally recognized as the originator of the MRI (by President Ronald Reagan, among others) and has received numerous prestigious awards such as the National Medal of Technology in 1988, the same year he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He was named Knights of Vartan 2003 “Man of the Year,” and on March 18, 2004, he received the Bower Award from the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia for his development of the MRI.

 

George B. Kauffman is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at California State University, Fresno, Calif.

[Yervant1]

From: "Moorad Alexanian"
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 23:19:12 -0500
Subject: Letter to the Editor ( American Physical Society News)

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201402/letters.cfm

Controversy Continues Over Picking Nobel Winners

The naming of Nobel Prize winners always raises the specter of
those who may have also contributed but who were not included in
the award. This year's physics prize is no exception (APS News,
November 2013).

This year's winners, François Englert and Peter Higgs, developed
the theoretical mechanism for the origin of mass of subatomic
particles. Others that proposed what is now known as the Higgs
field were the late Robert Brout, Carl Hagen, Gerald Guralnik, and
Tom Kibble.

The prize is not awarded posthumously and may not be shared among
more than three people. These criteria may explain why Brout,
longtime collaborator of Englert, was not included and thus why
only two were awarded the Prize.

The recent passing of Kenneth Wilson (Physics Today, November
2013, page 65) reminds us of a similar case regarding the 1982
Noble Prize in Physics awarded to Wilson for the development of
the renormalization group as applied to critical points and phase
transitions. The names of Michael Fisher, Leo Kadanoff, and
Benjamin Widom come to mind as possible contributors. Surely, the
three-person criterion may have been used in this case.

No doubt, there are many more cases of contention. However, a case
that stands out is that of Raymond Vahan Damadian, an American
medical practitioner and inventor of the first magnetic resonance
scanning machine. Damadian was the first to perform a full body
scan of a human being in 1977 to diagnose cancer. Damadian has
received a multitude of awards for his discoveries. In 2003, the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Paul
C. Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their discoveries concerning
magnetic resonance imaging. Surely, there was room here for a
third winner.

Moorad Alexanian
Wilmington, North Carolina

[Arpa]

Moorad Alexanian is a professor of Physics at NCU

Oddly, as he is a devout Christian, and a Scientist he subscribes to Christian Science denomination..

[hagopn]

Moorad is a very good man perhaps because of his religious leanings. I learned a lot from him during the olden listserve days.

[Alexanian]

I should like to correct some post regarding my religious faith. I am an evangelical Christian who adheres to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Although I am a scientist who is a Christian, nonetheless I am not a Christian Scientist. Although my CV appears at the Earth History Research Center, Southwestern Adventist University, Keene, TX, I am not a Seventh-day Adventist either. You can read more about me at http://meettheprof.com/prof/moorad-alexanian/

[MosJan]

Thank you for letting us know and welcome to Hye Forum

[Yervant1]

Armenpress.am

Nikol Pashinyan hosts renowned scientist Raymond Damadian

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17:59, 18 June, 2019

YEREVAN, JUNE 18, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan today hosted renowned Armenian scientist, inventor and physician Raymond Damadian, the creator of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device, ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister of Armenia.

Welcoming the famous scientist to the homeland, the Prime Minister hailed his scientific discovery, which played a revolutionary role in medicine.

“Your visit is a good opportunity to discuss the vision of the future Armenia. Our government sees Armenia as a technologically advanced country. Having a compatriot like you inspires confidence that we can be successful,”Nikol Pashinyan said, adding that Mr. Damadian is an exceptional example of the Armenian people’s talent.

While introducing his ongoing activities and programs, the famous scientist spoke of the opportunities offered by the new-generation MRI device. The interlocutors discussed the possibility of cooperation with Armenia’s medical and scientific institutions, the supply of new MRI devices to Armenia, as well as the development of education and science in the country.

 

 

https://armenpress.am/eng/news/978897.html?fbclid=IwAR3Pg2RSw-3QHKh_qjol57dyBFucZfEf-14k7-0axp8s_YtoH6qYlLBdcc8

[MosJan]

jannn