To the Editor:
Every so often the claim resurfaces that Dr. Raymond Damadian should have received, or shared, the 2003 Nobel Prize awarded to Dr. Paul Lauterbur (who did his work at Stony Brook) and Dr. Peter Mansfield for their "seminal discoveries … led to the development of modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
In the March 2008 Voice, Dr. Richard Macchia supports Damadian’s claim.
As a working NMR/MRI scientist, familiar with the evolution of the theory and practice, I disagree.
Damadian certainly wanted badly to build a useful scanner, but his effort failed. If you put a sack of grapefruit into a magnet, the water will give you an NMR signal. If the field is inhomogeneous and you move the sack around, the signal will change; you can plot the change, get a smudge and call it an image. In the 1950s, we used to move our tiny samples around in the magnetic field to find one of several "sweet spots, where the field was locally homogeneous enough (1 part in 10 million), to get sharpish NMR spectra (OK, if all the sample inside the receiver coil is also inside the spot). Damadian tried to make one spot inside the sample "super sweet and all the rest supersour (signal washed out); not surprisingly, he couldn’t do it. The idea was a dead end and he abandoned it.
In 1969, Lauterbur solved the problem of mapping the receiver amplitude/frequency response one-to-one with the physical object, by using controlled, reproducible linear field gradients, and obtained unambiguous, quantitative cross-sectional images; this was the fundamental breakthrough, the basis for all MRI today. Mansfield was a fundamental innovator: taking Ernst’s new pulsed-RF Fast Fourier Transform NMR spectroscopy (itself a quantum leap) and adding pulsed-current linear gradients, he created the MRI system used today.
– Arnold Wishnia
Associate Professor of Chemistry
SUNY Stony Brook
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