Professor Rigid on Evolution (must "believe" to get med school rec)

Micah Spradling was OK with learning about evolution in college, but his family drew the line when his belief in the theory became a prerequisite for continuing his education.

Tim Spradling said his son left Texas Tech this semester and enrolled in Lubbock Christian University after en countering the policy of one associate professor in biological sciences.

Professor Michael Dini's Web site states that a student must "truthfully and forthrightly" believe in human evolution to receive a letter of recommendation from him.

"How can someone who does not accept the most important theory in biology expect to properly practice in a field that is so heavily based on biology?" Dini's site reads.

Dini says on the site that it is easy to imagine how physicians who ignore or neglect the "evolutionary origin of humans can make bad clinical decisions."

He declined to speak with The Avalanche-Journal. His response to an e-mail from The A-J said: "This semester, I have 500 students to contend with, and my schedule in no way permits me to participate in such a debate."

A Tech spokeswoman said Chancellor David Smith and other Tech officials also did not want to comment on the story.

At least two Lubbock doctors and a medical ethicist said they have a problem with the criterion, and the ethicist said Dini "could be a real ingrate."

Tim Spradling, who owns The Brace Place, said his son wanted to follow in his footsteps and needed a letter from a biology professor to apply for a program at Southwestern University's medical school.

Spradling is not the only medical professional in Lub bock shocked by Dini's policy. Doctors Patrick Edwards and Gaylon Seay said they learned evolution in college but were never forced to believe it.

"I learned what they taught," Edwards said. "I had to. I wanted to make good grades, but it didn't change my basic beliefs."

Seay said his primary problem is Dini "trying to force someone to pledge allegiance to his way of thinking."

Seay, a Tech graduate who has practiced medicine since 1977, said a large amount of literature exists against the theory.

"He is asking people to compromise their religious be liefs," Seay said. "It is a shame for a professor to use that as a criteria."

Dini's site also states: "So much physical evidence supports" evolution that it can be referred to as fact even if all the details are not known.

"One can deny this evidence only at the risk of calling into question one's understanding of science and of the method of science," Dini states on the Web site.

Dini is in a position of authority and "can injure someone's career," and the criteria is the "most prejudice thing I have ever read," Seay said.

Both doctors said their beliefs in creationism have never negatively affected their practices, and Seay said he is a more compassionate doctor because of his beliefs.

"I do not believe evolution has anything to do with the ability to make clinical decisions — pro or con," Seay said.

"A student may learn about a subject, but that does not mean that everything must be accepted as fact, just because the professor or an incomplete body of evidence says so," Edwards said.

The letter of recommendation should not be contingent on Dini's beliefs, Edwards said.

"That would be like Texas Tech telling him he had to be a Christian to teach biology," Edwards said.

Harold Vanderpool, professor in history and philosophy of medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, said he has a problem with Dini's policy.

"I think this professor could be a real ingrate," Vanderpool said. "I have a problem with a colleague who has enjoyed all the academic freedoms we have, which are extensive, and yet denies that to our students."

Vanderpool, who has served on, advised or chaired committees for the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, said the situation would be like a government professor requiring a student to be "sufficiently patriotic" to receive a letter.

"It seems to me that this professor is walking a pretty thin line between the protection of his right to do what he wants to do, his own academic freedom, and a level of discrimination toward a student," he said.

"It is reaching into an area of discrimination. That could be a legal problem. If not, it is a moral problem," Vanderpool said.

Instead of a recommendation resting on character and academic performance, "you've got this ideological litmus test you are using," he said. "To me, that is problematic, if not outright wrong."

William F. May, a medical ethicist who was appointed to President Bush's Council on Bioethics, said he cannot remember establishing a criterion on the question of belief with a student on exams or with letters of recommendation.

"I taught at five institutions and have always felt you should grade papers and offer judgments on the quality of arguments rather than a position on which they arrived."

Professors "enjoy the protection of academic freedom" and Dini "seems to be profoundly ungrateful" for the freedom, Vanderpool said.

He said a teacher cannot be forced to write a letter of recommendation for a student, which he believes is good because the letters are personal and have "to do with the professor's assessment of students' work habits, character, grades, persistence and so on."

A policy such as Dini's needs to be in the written materials and should be stated in front of the class so the student is not surprised by the policy and can drop the class, Vanderpool said.

Dini's site states that an individual who denies the evidence commits malpractice in the method of science because "good scientists would never throw out data that do not conform to their expectations or beliefs."

People throw out information be cause "it seems to contradict his/her cherished beliefs," Dini's site reads. A physician who ignores data cannot remain a physician for long, it states.

Dini's site lists him as an exceptional faculty member at Texas Tech in 1995 and says he was named "Teacher of the Year" in 1998-99 by the Honors College at Texas Tech.

Edwards said he does not see any evidence on Dini's vita that he attended medical school or treated patients.

"Dr. Dini is a nonmedical person trying to impose his ideas on medicine," Edwards said. "There is little in common between teaching biology classes and treating sick people. ... How dare someone who has never treated a sick person purport to impose his feelings about evolution on someone who aspires to treat such people?"

On his Web site, Dini questions how someone who does not believe in the theory of evolution can ask to be recommended into a scientific profession by a professional scientist.

May, who taught at multiple prestigious universities, including Yale, during his 50 years in academia, said he did not want to judge Dini and qualified his statements because he did not know all of the specifics.

He said the doctors may be viewing Dini's policy as a roadblock, but the professor may be warning them in advance of his policy so students are not dismayed later.

"I have never seen it done and am surprised to hear it, but he may find creationist aggressive in the class and does not want to have to cope with that," May said. "He is at least giving people the courtesy of warning them in advance."

The policy seems unusual, May said, but Dini should not be "gang-tackled and punished for his policy."

The criterion may have been viewed as a roadblock for Micah Spradling at Tech, but it opened a door for him at LCU.

Classes at LCU were full, Tim Spradling said, but school officials made room for his son after he showed them Dini's policy.

Whatever. I consider the attack on Damadian as a "nut" a very telling indication of the objectiveness of the attacker. Furthermore, it is very disappointing when someone I considered "objective" embracing such an attack. Further search makes it clear that both Damadian and Lauterbur have legitimate claim to invention of the technology. I have not attacked Lauterbur or anyone else for any claim of MRI. I have presented what I have found on the subject here. On the other hand, Damadian has been presented as some interloper, who has attempted to take unwarranted credit from others. The accolades speak for themselves. Damadian is no thief, neither is Lauterbur. But my defense of Damadian has been drawn from what I have found on the internet from sites I consider as having no reason to twist the facts. The AIG citation was chosen as it is the only site I found that gave an easy indication of Damadian's views on evolution.

I mentioned further searching. Here it is.

The "Indomitable" MRI

Raymond Damadian's medical imaging machine set off a revolution — but not without controversy

In the vast archives of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History resides the title of ownership to a machine named Indomitable that represents a milestone in the history of medical imaging. Its story is a timeless one of a driven inventor who perseveres through every obstacle only to find that others are racing along similar paths, which in this case led to today's ubiquitous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines.

Columbia University professor Isidor I. Rabi first observed the quantum phenomenon dubbed nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in 1937. He recognized that atomic nuclei betray their presence by absorbing or emitting radio waves when exposed to a sufficiently strong magnetic field. Within a decade of Rabi's discovery, chemists and physicists had adopted NMR as a standard analysis for substances. But 30-some years would elapse before anyone even considered using the method to scan a breathing human body for cancer.

Enter Raymond Damadian. An experimenter at heart, he brought a fresh perspective to NMR — that of a physician. He had earned a medical degree at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and pursued his medical research career at Brooklyn's Downstate Medical Center.

Damadian's first foray into the field of imaging began when, during a postgraduate stint at Harvard University, he experienced excruciating abdominal pains. Doctors detected nothing using x-rays or other conventional methods short of surgery. Damadian decided a better way must be found to examine the inner workings of the body.

The proverbial lightning bolt struck Damadian in 1969, after he used an NMR machine to investigate his ideas about electrically charged particles in the body. His associate Freeman Cope, a Navy physician and physicist, brought him to a small company on the outskirts of Pittsburgh where the two measured potassium, a common electrolyte, in a strain of Dead Sea bacteria.

At breakfast a few mornings later, Damadian wondered aloud about what would happen "where you have an antenna wrapped around the human body, where you can look at an atom, and then another atom, and then another atom — you could go from one tissue to the next and, without ever invading the body, get the chemistry of each organ." Even Cope thought Damadian's idea far-fetched, but Damadian committed himself to the quest.

In 1970 Damadian returned to test cancerous liver samples from rats with the NMR equipment. On the basis of his electrolyte work, he surmised that the hydrogen signal in cancerous tissue might differ from that of healthy tissue because tumors contain more water. More water meant more hydrogen atoms — two per water molecule. Once the bath of radio waves was switched off, telltale emissions from the cancerous regions would linger longer than those from the healthy, less aqueous regions. It worked. The journal Science published his findings in March 1971. Cancerous tissues could now be detected in humans without resorting to radiation, he reasoned, if a large-scale scanner could be built.

Later that same year, Paul Lauterbur, a chemist and NMR pioneer at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, conceived of a way to use NMR to produce an image. His idea, documented in a notebook, entailed using magnetic field gradients to map out a series of points. In 1973 Lauterbur produced the first NMR image of a small amount of water in a test tube, a feat he published in the journal Nature. Soon after, he imaged the first live subject: a tiny clam.

Though Lauterbur's gradient approach quickly gained favor over Damadian's human scanner method, Damadian filed for a patent on his concept in 1972 and received it in 1974. He forged ahead, determined to make the first human scan. Aided by graduate students, he built the heart of Indomitable, a homemade superconducting magnet, from roughly 30 miles of niobium-titanium wire wrapped on a cylinder. The magnet, a hollow cylinder, spanned 53 inches in diameter, big enough to swallow up a human. On top, the team installed an elaborate liquid helium cooling system to keep resistance in the wire near zero. But the helium leaked miserably, costing $2,000 a week and reducing the magnet's strength.

Without time for modifications, Damadian pushed his team onward. Mike Goldsmith, one of his graduate students, cobbled a wearable antenna coil fashioned from cardboard, capacitors and copper wire. Others fine-tuned the rest: an oscilloscope to monitor the hydrogen broadcasts detected by the coil; a minicomputer to translate the received signals into an image; and a manually operated wooden platform to move the subject. Damadian's moment of reckoning finally arrived on May 11, 1977. Inside his Downstate Medical Center lab, he ran through his checklist, a process that took about 12 hours.

Approval from the school's Human Experimentation Committee seemed unnecessary. Damadian had volunteered himself as the first guinea pig.

With veiled trepidation, Damadian shimmied into the corsetlike antenna coil and sat down on the movable platform inside his shiny, 1 1/2-ton contraption. Without fanfare, Damadian's assistant powered up Indomitable's systems and subsystems.

Seconds passed. Then minutes. The team couldn't detect any radio signal. A half-hour passed. Still no signal. After hours of tinkering, still nothing. "We were very depressed," Damadian recalls. "We had been telling the whole world that we were going to be able to do this thing and we failed."

Eventually the thought occurred that Damadian might be too corpulent for the feeble coil. Apparently fat insulates the body from more than mere cold weather.

For seven weeks after the test, graduate student Larry Minkoff keenly monitored his boss, watching for any odd behavior or ailment. Detecting none, he offered his own svelter torso to science.

The machine appreciated his lean physique. On July 3, 1977, nearly five hours after the start of this test, Indomitable achieved the first human scan and became the first MRI prototype. The crude image, reconstructed first with colored pencils and then by computer from 106 data points, revealed a two-dimensional view of Minkoff's chest — including his heart and lungs.

Damadian trumpeted Indomitable's success to the media, asserting, perhaps a bit rashly, in a July 20 press release that "a new technique for the nonsurgical detection of cancer anywhere in the human body has now been perfected."

A year later, he founded a company to commercialize the technology. Named for his field focusing approach, the Fonar Corporation marketed its first product in 1980, based on the Indomitable prototype.

Today, Indomitable, minus its electronic subsystems, is prominently displayed at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, on loan from the National Museum of American History. The Hall of Fame inducted Damadian in 1989. A year earlier, Damadian shared the National Medal of Technology with Lauterbur for their independent contributions to MRI technology.

The use of MRI technology, of course, has spread so rapidly that nowadays even dogs and cats benefit from its revealing scans. Improvements to MRI machines have even made it possible to trace thought or perception sequences for brain research.

Despite the technology's success, detractors denounce the first Indomitable image as "meaningless," given its crudeness and vulnerability to bias. Moreover, they view Damadian's so-called breakthrough as a technical dead end: even his own company, Fonar, abandoned the approach and adopted Lauterbur's in the early 1980s. But Damadian considers Fonar's courtroom victory in 1997 over General Electric, which forced the industry giant to award him $128 million for patent infringements, as proof of the priority of his concept.

Raymond Damadian now is racing other experimenters to create a giant MRI machine that will allow surgeons to view patients' interior anatomies while they operate. Historians of science, meanwhile, will review the history of MRI technology to distinguish braggadocio from brilliance, as tough a task as measuring spin on electrons. If claims hold up, someone from the field may again make headlines — as a Nobel Prize winner.

By Julie Wakefield

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