2003 NOBEL PRIZE FOR MRI DENIED TO RAYMOND VAHAN DAMADIAN
By George B. Kauffman // November 7, 2013 in Featured, Headline, Special Reports
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.
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.
‘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(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.
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.