But Dr. Damadian's initial work had several flaws. His scanning method relied on a point-by-point analysis of the entire human body, which proved impractical.
Exactly.
This is simply not imaging, in the sense in which everyone in the field describes it, any more than taking an individual X-ray of every small part of the body is a CAT scan. As far as I can tell, Damadian does not even understand the mathematics of reconstructing a three dimensional image from two dimensional projections. And Damadian's contention that he would have 'eventually' come up with Lauterbur's insight is an admission of failure. The fact is, he didn't, and then he disgraced himself by fighting a 25 year campaign to steal credit for another man's work. But you can take in a lot of suckers with a $100m bankroll.
Then to what was Lauterbur referring in his 1972 paper?
A new imaging technique called zeugmatography is disclosed which takes advantage of induced local interactions to overcome the wavelength-dependence limitation of normal imaging systems.
"Ross points out a truly amazing case of planning by an Intelligent Creator: "The sun's luminosity ... has increased by more than 35 percent since life was first introduced on earth. Such a change is more than enough to exterminate life. But life survived on earth because the increase in solar luminosity was exactly cancelled out each step of the way by a decrease in the efficiency of the greenhouse effect in earth's atmosphere. The decrease in greenhouse efficiency arose through the careful introduction of just the right species of life in just the right quantities at just the right times."
"How, he asks, could a... strictly natural Darwinian---process anticipate the physics of solar burning?"