no nobel for raymond damadian

ok. i am looking at today's new york times, print version, and this is a full page "advertisement" on page A9. apparently he has spent $300,000 putting these in the NYT, the washington post and i think maybe the LA times as well.

whew! after much googling, i found the text:

http://www.fonar.com/nytimes_ad11_3tx.htm

it's his second letter in ten days to his "fellow medical doctors" (although this one's in first-person) about the "shameful wrong" of the nobel prize committee to NOT give him the prize this year for his work on developing the MRI.

i'm simply curious as to what your opinions are on this, mostly if you think it's whiny or justified.

[Edited on Nov 03, 2003 by er]

My first reaction is that he will never win it now. The Nobel people don't like whiners.

Secondly, he's looking to get a Nobel in the wrong field. The NMR/MRI is much more important to chemistry than it is to medicine. I mean, medical doctors don't exactly do science, they diagnose problems and provide therapy. His work is not based on advances in medical therapy, it's based on a technical achievement that has always had many more applications in doing the science behind medicine than in therapeutic/diagnostic contexts. Pretty much every chemistry and bio- or medicinal chemistry department at any research institution or pharmaceutical company is going to have at least one NMR machine, but even in areas that are centers of medical research (Philly, Boston, New York, etc.), a lot of hospitals don't have even one MRI facility.

what a fucking lamer
boo hoo i lost
now ill cry about it like a rich stupid retard uggghh

the fact is, though, magnetic resonance has become an indisposable tool for medical diagnosis, and therefore an essential part of medical practice. "Medical doctors don't exactly do science"???? Are you insane??? i can't even begin to respond to the incorrectness of this statement. MDs may not all do lab work (though many do), but to say that medical diagnosis, treatment, surgery, etc. ad infinitum is "not science" is simply and completely mistaken.

the reason that a lot of hospitals don't have one MRI facility is primarily the prohibitive expense of installing and maintaining one. MRIs are not generally performed on an emergency basis, so if a patient requires one for diagnosis he/she can be sent to an area hospital that does have such a facility.

And regardless, whether damadian's work has primarily benefited chemists or MDs is moot, as he was the one who initiated the work.

Which doesn't make him any less of a whiner, but at least he's got a bit of a point.

Well. If by 'science', you generally mean working with chemicals, lab tests, etc. then sure, medicine is science. But if you're talking about testing hypotheses, reproducible results, controls & variables, etc. then it's not. The former is layman's term, I think, and the latter is a term used by both scientists and doctors. Since the disinction is relevant to the Nobel Foundation- there are separate prizes awarded in Chemistry and Medicine- I was trying to tease out the differences.

This is exactly why he didn't get the Nobel. If hospitals were asking for MRI's at such a rate that every hospital had an MRI facility, I think he'd be a shoe-in. On the other hand, I can't imagine a chem department at a university having to send out samples for analysis.

Unfortunately, importance to one's field is also a factor in consideration for the Nobel. There are a lot more PhD's out there using Damadian's work than oncologists.

Yeah, but now he doesn't have a ghost of a chance.

Smiley humor. Isn't it great.

The scandal lies in the fact that the Nobel was awarded to chemist Paul Lauterbur.

Dr. Damadian's initial work had several flaws. His scanning method relied on a point-by-point analysis of the entire human body, which proved impractical. And it turned out that relaxation rates are not a reliable indicator of cancer, as his paper had theorized.

Nevertheless, his observation of T1 and T2 differences in cancerous tissue was a Eureka moment for Paul Lauterbur. After seeing Dr. Damadian's experiment repeated by a graduate student, Mr. Lauterbur dined at a hamburger joint, where he had a flash of brilliance.
He realized he could subject the nuclei to a second magnetic field that varied in strength in a precise way. Though the idea of a "magnetic field gradient" was not new, Mr. Lauterbur was the first to see how it could be used to reconstruct an image. He wrote his idea in a notebook and had it witnessed the next day. His work, with later contributions from Peter Mansfield, forms the basis for modern MRI imaging.

Over the years, Mr. Lauterbur has been less than forthcoming about giving Dr. Damadian credit. In his notebook he acknowledged Dr. Damadian's 1971 paper, but his subsequent articles didn't mention it. Mr. Lauterbur explains that by the time he published his first paper "another group had made a measurement on a tumor in a mouse's tail. I needed to keep the list of references to very few, so I used that one."

Even today, when Mr. Lauterbur discusses his Eureka moment, he says that he happened to be present when a student "was doing some studies of tumors." He doesn't mention that the student was repeating Dr. Damadian's experiment. For his part, Dr. Damadian says credit for inventing the MRI goes to "me, and then Lauterbur," though he thinks both of them should get the Nobel Prize. Mr. Lauterbur claims sole credit.

full article
here.