Re: Why Didn't Damadian win the Nobel?

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Drailler) wrote:

>Why didn't Dr. Raymond Damadian win the Nobel in Medicine for MRI? He 
>clearly did more to advance the science than those other two.

Well for one thing, I'm not sure the committee looks kindly on the kind of
PR campaign you might see for a college football player up for the Heisman.
 Damadian was campaigning for nearly 20 years, giving all the appearance of
an obsession with the prize.  I was at the meeting (I think it was London,
1984) where there was nearly a fistfight when Damadian challenged Lauterbur
to give him credit for MRI.  

The rivalry certainly was an obsession for Damadian, who even founded a
rival society (SMRI) to the society (SMRM) founded by Lauterbur and various
others involved in early MRI development.  The two societies finally merged
a while ago.

And while both Lauterbur's original method of image reconstruction (from
projections) and Damadian's (sensitive point) were soon obsolete,
Lauterbur's fundamental contribution of encoding position information on
the NMR signal using a field gradient is still essential today, as is
Mansfield's contribution of the spin echo.  It was a good choice by the
committee.  

Matthew Mitchell, PhD
(Lauterbur lab, summer 1982)