Bull, you are blinded by your worldview and your loyalty to a colleague. I have said nothing bad about Lauterbur, but you do not hesitate to belittle an acknowledged pioneer in the field. First, Damadian has patents filed. Second, these patents were useful enough to GE and others that diagnostic equipment was built using them. The proof is in the suit he won and the concessions he got from others.
Against All Odds: History of the MRI
Once the potential to detect tumors was accepted, however, Dr. Damadian had to fight off giant companies such as Hitachi and General Electric to protect his patented technology. Hitachi settled out of court, but the case against GE went to trial in 1995. In a "David v. Goliath" lawsuit, FONAR won one of the largest patent settlements on record: $128.7 million.
That is proof enough to most people that Damadian is no fraud.
Here is one comment, and note the charge at the end. It is worse than your charge against another creationist for allowing his name to be added to a study which had a portion he would disagree with.
Damadian invented Medical MRI
As a physician with a biophysics degree, I have followed the Damadian story from its beginnings. Claiming he didn't invent MRI is like saying the Wright brothers did not invent powered flight because slighly later aircraft were rather different from their original "Flyer".
T1/T2 had been around for decades. He was the first to realize and show they could be used for imaging. This is what made medical MRI possble and will be used long after the contributons of this years winners are obsolete.
Further, in the patent suit, Lauderbur's notebook revealed that he had been directly inspired by Damadian, though he never acknowledged this in his published work. This is called "citation plagarism" and is a definite no-no.
Posted by: Peter H Proctor, PhD, M at October 14, 2003 08:35 AM
I'd like to see the notebook; I have not idea who this Peter Proctor is, or why his opinion on citations is one I should care about. In any case, he's wrong. You cite past work in a field; you don't cite 'inspiration'. I've gotten a lot of my best ideas in the shower, but I don't cite the Peerless faucet company.
Lauterbur's original paper did not in any way address relaxation times or their use to generate contrast in images; it employed NMR to study the distribution of protons in a sample, not T1 as a method to get contrast between different types of protons. As such, Damadian's observation of differential T1 relaxation rates in cancer cells was irrelevant, and the Nobel Committee recognized it as such. Lauterbur indeed saw from Damadian's work that it might be useful to image the human body by NMR, but in no way did it show him how to do it. It's the 'how' that matters. I can find any number of written works that tell me how great it would be to travel faster than light, but if I discover how to build an engine to do that, I'm not indebted to those authors because they inspired me to do the work.
As I understand the case, Damadian won the patent suit against GE because GE were using relaxation-weighted imaging, not because they were using imaging per se.
I'll repeat it again; in the field, Damadian is regarded as something of a nutcase. He is not viewed as a nutcase because of his creationist ideas, but you can be sure that those who know he's a creationist regard it as yet another symptom. Those aren't comfortable facts for another creationist like yourself, but they are facts.