October 8, 2003

Not winning the Nobel
Raymond Damadian was conspicuously absent from the medicine prize awardees | By Stephen Pincock

Handing out prizes for scientific achievements is, by its nature, a controversial business. More often than not, assigning credit to an individual for an invention or breakthrough means leaving out others who played an important part.

When the award is as prestigious as a Nobel Prize, the stakes are clearly higher than ever. And in the case of this year's prize for physiology or medicine, given to scientists who played a part in developing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the controversy had already been boiling for years.

That's because the claim of “inventing” MRI has long been the subject of a dispute, largely centering around two US researchers—Paul C. Lauterbur, who jointly won the 2003 prize, and Raymond Damadian, who did not.

The debate over these two men's place in history has been a regular topic of discussion at scientific meetings. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal published a report suggesting that the awarding of a Nobel Prize for MRI had been held up because of the dispute.

“What bothers me,” Nicolaas Bloembergen , the 1981 Nobel laureate in physics, told the Journal's Cameron Stracher, “is that the institute in Stockholm has not yet awarded the prize for this great discovery. I believe this is partly due to controversy over Damadian's role.”

Damadian, a physician born in Queens, NY, was unquestionably a pioneer in the application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in medicine, conducting key work on tumors in rats in the early 1970s that predated the experiments by Lauterbur and his co-awardee Peter Mansfield that garnered them this year's prize.

In 1972, he filed a patent application for using nuclear magnetic resonance to scan for cancerous tissue in the human body, which was subsequently awarded. His group was also the first to build an MRI scanner.

In 1988, Lauterbur and Damadian were jointly awarded the US National Medal of Technology for their independent contributions to the field. Any number of Web sites list Damadian as the “inventor” of MRI. He has also been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Last year, at least, Damadian felt that credit for inventing the MRI should go to “me, and then Lauterbur,” which he was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal piece. “If I had not been born, would MRI have existed? I don't think so. If Lauterbur had not been born? I would have gotten there. Eventually.”

So why did the Nobel committee disagree? Primarily, some leading scientists say, because the approach to scanning first proposed by Damadian was surpassed by a technique using gradients in the magnetic field developed by Lauterbur and Mansfield.

An article from the National Academy of Sciences' Beyond Discovery Web site sums up this argument: “An essential technical advance that opened up the ensuing widespread application of NMR to produce useful images was due to chemist Paul Lauterbur, who was then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1971, he watched a chemist named Leon Saryan repeat Damadian's experiments with tumors and healthy tissues from rats. Lauterbur concluded that the technique was insufficiently informative for locating and diagnosing tumors and went on to devise a practical way to use NMR to make images,” it says.

To put it another way: “The actual implementation of MRI probably better goes to Lauterbur, but the use of MRI for medical problems—I think Damadian deserves some credit for that,” one senior Canadian NMR researcher told The Scientist.

Supporters of Damadian feel that recognition should have come in the form of the Nobel. "Arguably, Raymond Damadian...played at least as much a role in the development of medical MRI as did this year's two winners," one physician told The Scientist.

What all this illustrates, says another prominent Canadian researcher R. Mark Henkelman , professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, is the difficulty of pinpointing the eureka moment in scientific endeavor.

“This is probably one of the hardest prizes, as making MRI a reality in the medical domain involved many, many people,” he told The Scientist. “It's very hard to go back to the beginning and stick your finger on one guy with one bright idea.”

Nevertheless, Henkelman thinks the Nobel committee did the right thing. “I think he [Damadian] had a real insight on NMR and cancer and that there might be differences in tissue with pathology that might show up with magnetic resonance, but that's not what this prize is given for, the prize is given for MR imaging and that really belongs to the other two people.”

Damadian was contacted for this article, but did not comment by the time of publication.

Richard Ernst , winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, takes a philosophical view on the whole thing.

“It's not a very pleasant issue,” he told The Scientist. “There are always arguments about who deserved it most. You have to just live with the facts and the reality and accept your fate.”

Links for this article:

• H. Cohen, “But what about the others?” The Scientist, 16:20, October 28, 2002.
  http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2002/oct/cohen_p20_021028.html

• Nobel e-Museum
  http://www.nobel.se

• S. Pincock, “MRI scientists win Nobel prize” The Scientist, October 6, 2003.
  http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20031006/06

• Opinion Journal, from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page
  http://opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110001844

• Nicolaas Bloembergen, Nobel Prize in Physics 1981
  http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/1981/index.html

• Technology Administration National Medal of Technology
  http://www.technology.gov/medal/

• National Inventors Hall of Fame
  http://www.invent.org/index.asp

• Beyond Discovery
  http://www.beyonddiscovery.org/content/view.page.asp?I=134

• R. Mark Henkelman
  http://medbio.utoronto.ca/faculty/henkelman.html

• Richard Ernst, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1991
  http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1991/index.html

  ©2003, The Scientist Inc. in association with BioMed Central.