Posted on 10/31/2003 4:18:46 AM PST by Dales
Weblog: Did Nobel Committee Ignore MRI Creator Because of Creationism?
Plus: The faith-based initiative hold-up, freedom to worship at home, and other stories from online sources around the world.
| posted 10/10/2003
Not everybody on the Nobel Committee loves Raymond Damadian
While today's Nobel Peace Prize announcement will no doubt reignite discussion over whether Islam is a religion of peace, and may cause some to ask what happened to the buzz that Pope John Paul II would win, others are still discussing the controversy over this year's Nobel Prize in medicine.
The Nobel Committee on Monday announced that the prize would be awarded to Paul C. Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI scans.
But when you ask Google who invented the MRI, the most common answer is Raymond V. Damadian. What's up? The controversy has been percolating, and The Wall Street Journal reported last year that "a ferocious battle in the scientific community over who gets credit" probably held up an MRI-related Nobel for years.
A full-page ad in yesterday's The Washington Post said the Nobel committee was "attempting to rewrite history" and "did one thing it has no right to do: It ignored the truth."
Likewise, Damadian told Newsday, "I can't escape the fact that I started it all. … My concern is the distortion by the Nobel Committee to write me out of the history of the MRI. Every history book from now on will say the MRI is Lauterbur and Mansfield."
"I know that had I never been born, there would be no MRI today," he told The Washington Post.
Many scientists agree, but some suggest that Damadian's self-promotion may have hurt him. He's "sometimes flamboyant," NPR science correspondent Richard Knox told All Things Considered yesterday.
But Knox, along with Reason magazine's Ronald Bailey, suggested another reason Damadian may have been disregarded: He's a devout Christian (see this 1997 profile in Christianity Today sister publication Christian Reader) who believes in creationism. In fact, he's on the Technical Advisory Board for the Institute for Creation Research, and on the reference board for Answers in Genesis's upcoming Creation Museum.
"He's identified by many web sites as a prominent creation scientist," Knox said. "I have no first-hand knowledge of his beliefs, but it's fair to say that most scientists are not creationists and tend to look askance at scientists who believe that way, but it's really impossible to know if the Nobel Committee took that into account."
Bailey similarly writes, "I have no inside information, but I wonder if the committee was swayed by the fact that Damadian, although a brilliant inventor, is apparently a creation science nut. In ironic contrast, Lauterbur's current research is on the chemical origins of life."
The Nobel Committee, meanwhile, says it doesn't talk about why certain people don't receive the prizes. It only talks about why winners do.
Watch this space
Lots of links below, but come back this afternoon for even more, along with fresh news and commentary. It's a busy religion news day, so we couldn't fit it all in this morning.
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1) This would be a very bad thread in which to engage in flamebaiting or flamewarring.
2) Trying to guess my views based on the article's content is just going to make you look foolish. A few have tried despite this caution. For what purpose, I have no idea but I do know that it isn't going to help.
Posted to news because of the relevance to news events and because of the news items regarding faith based initiatives.
You knew this was coming, didn't you?
Very interesting.
Indeed; I think there were a few threads on this a few weeks back, and I further believe RWP has the skinny on the Damadian MRI controversy.
If recollection serves, Damadian was a pioneer in Magnetic Resonance research, but it was the other guys (the Nobel Prize winners) who pioneered MR Imaging, which is the technology that is used so extensively by the medical profession today.
But I should let RWP speak directly on the topic; I know he's familiar with it.
Being nuts is not a disqualification for science prizes, although they did scope out John Nash before allowing him on the platform. I think if you look at the prizes awarded to physicists in the early 20th century you could find some justifiably hurt feelings.
"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."
That's clearly an admission that he did not invent MRI. Nobel Prizes are not awarded to people who think they would have made the discovery eventually, had the actual discoverer not gotten there first.
I've been aware of the history of this controversy for the last 20 years. I have been in the field of magnetic resonance since 1977, and attended a seminar by Peter Mansfield in that year or 1978 (I forget), reporting some of the first MRI results. I succeeeded Lauterbur at SUNY Stony Brook, and took over his lab space (unfortunately, with far less success). I know most of the principals in the case, including the people with whom Lauterbur 'talked through' his ideas. I have no doubt of his originality and priority in this discovery.
Damadian's contribution was to show that tumors had different relaxation properties than surrounding tissue; however, he did not invent any imaging technique within the commonly understood meaning of the term. His best idea was to move a coil around the body to try to localize signals. The idea that magentic resonance distinguishes between tumors and healthy tissue undoubtedly motivated Lauterbur to go look for a way to image objects using magnetic resonance, but the imaging method itself was entirely his. Of course, MRIs are used for a whole host of other medical diagnostic purposes now, not merely tumors.
As for his Christianity; I doubt that very many of us in the field who discount his role in the invention of MRI (while acknowledging his early attempts to apply NMR to medicine) knew of Damadian's religion or his belief in Creationism. I certainly did not, and it has never come up in any discussion with my peers in which I participated.
My father described it as like being in a garbage can with a hundred people beating on it.
And justifiably so; the last thing the Nobel Committee needs is for one of it's prize winners to announce he's the "Emperor of Antarctica" during his acceptance speech.
I think we need to distinguish between the Peace and Literature prizes, which are highly politicized, and the Physics, Chemistry and Medicine prizes, which are not (at least not in terms of conventional politics; academic politics are a different matter).
I can honestly say I don't know the political or religious views of 90% of my colleagues. There are three academic scientists who are anti-evo, and with whose work I am professionally familiar - Henry F. Schaefer, Michael Behe, and Raymond Damadian. In all three cases, I learned of their beliefs on FR, long after I was familiar with their research, and was rather surprised in each case. This sort of stuff simply doesn't come up, as a general rule. I doubt the Nobel Committee even knows about it.
Indeed, the political statements appear to come from the Peace and Literature awards.
I doubt if a Nazi scientist would ever win a Nobel, but unless a candidate wears his ideology on his shoulder - why would they care?
Ironically however, there seems to be more holistic (whole view) scientists out of old Europe/Russia. Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if they were more tolerant of non-materialist scientists than here in the U.S.
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