Raymond Damadian
Raymond Vahan Damadian (March 16, 1936 – August 3, 2022) was an American physician, medical researcher, and inventor of the first nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) scanning machine.
[1][2][3][4] Damadian's 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.
[20] He and other researchers independently investigated the signals of 1H NMR in cells, and found that the relaxation times were much shorter than in distilled water.
[citation needed] In a 1971 paper in the journal Science,[21] SUNY Downstate Medical Center professor Damadian reported that tumors can be detected in vivo by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) because of much longer relaxation times than normal tissue.
As the National Science Foundation notes, "The patent included the idea of using NMR to 'scan' the human body to locate cancerous tissue.
Prompted by Damadian's report on the potential medical uses of NMR, Paul Lauterbur expanded on Carr's technique and developed a way to generate the first MRI images, in 2D and 3D, using gradients.
Peter Mansfield from the University of Nottingham then developed a mathematical technique that would allow scans to take seconds rather than hours and produce clearer images than Lauterbur had.
According to a Wall Street Journal article,[27] Damadian's initial methods were flawed for practical use,[26] relying on a point-by-point scan of the entire body and using relaxation rates, which turned out to not be an effective indicator of cancerous tissue.
His patent followed on the heels of rumors already floating throughout the scientific community of Lauterbur's proposed idea of using NMR in vivo (still in the human body, an imaging device).
In 1978, Damadian formed his own company, Fonar[32] (which stood for "Field Focused Nuclear Magnetic Resonance"), for the production of MRI scanners, and in 1980, he produced the first commercial one.
[34] They settled with many large companies, but a case against General Electric went to the Federal Circuit, which upheld a $129 million ruling against GE for violation of Damadian's patents.
The company conceived and built the world's first Upright Multi-Positional MRI, which was recognized as The "Invention of the Year" in 2007 by the Intellectual Properties Owners Association Education Foundation.
His original MRI full-body scanner was given to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio.
[42] In 2003, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for their discoveries related to MRI.
"[27] The New York Times wrote:The issue has been the subject of a dispute between Dr. Damadian and Dr. Lauterbur and has been known for years in academic circles, with some fearing that the Nobel committee would steer clear of magnetic resonance imaging altogether because of the Swedes' supposed distaste for controversial discoveries.
[35]After the announcement of Lauterbur and Mansfield's Nobels, between October and November 2003, an ad hoc group called "The Friends of Raymond Damadian" (formed by Damadian's company FONAR[43]) took out full-page advertisements in The New York Times twice, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and one of the largest newspapers in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter protesting his exclusion with the headline "The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted"[44] in an attempt to get the Nobel Committee to change its mind and grant him a share of the Prize.
Supporting Damadian were various MRI experts including John Throck Watson, Eugene Feigelson, V. Adrian Parsegian, David Stark, and James Mattson.
[46] However, he had to admit that Erwin Chargaff, whose two rules were instrumental in the discovery of DNA's structure, was very vocal about his omission, and Fred Hoyle was irate about Jocelyn Bell's exclusion.
[citation needed] Others pointed out that while Damadian had hypothesized that NMR relaxation times might be used to detect cancer, he did not develop (nor did he suggest) the current way of creating images.
[24] Since the Nobel Prize was awarded to Lauterbur and Mansfield for the development of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Damadian's exclusion makes more sense.
Some felt that research scientists sided with Lauterbur because he was one of their own, while Damadian was a physician who had profited greatly from his early patents.
[27] Charles Springer, an expert in MRI at Oregon Health and Science University, said that if a poll was taken of the academic community, most would agree with the Nobel Committee's conclusions.
[35] And Mansfield wrote in his autobiography that "the person who really missed out" on winning the prize was Erwin Hahn for his contribution to the principles of spin echoes.
