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Nobel Prize for Medicine For MRI
andy1307 writes "American Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield have won the Nobel prize for medicine for discoveries leading to MRI. Worldwide, more than 60 million investigations with MRI are performed each year, and the technique is ``a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research,'' the Assembly said. The work was done on the 1970s. Lauterbur is at the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Urbana and Mansfield is at the University of Nottingham in Britain. "
He had considerable opposition when he was developing the technology. Nuclear magnetic resonance didn't seem a good technology to make into a scanning system. His department chair cut off his funding at one point.
Now, thanks to MRI, we get to see pictures of very interesting things such as sex in an MRI tube...
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I have the exact opposite point of view. These routine news items like awards shouldnt be on slashdot frontpage at all. Look at slashdot, everytime a hugo award is given out its on slashdot (even though after harry potter getting it, its no more fun). Every time an Ig Nobel is announced its a story (Ok those are fun). Now Nobel awards are frontpage material. ..Maybe comments on stories add some informational value to the stories..
From the linked article
The physics award will be announced Tuesday and the chemistry and economics awards Wednesday in the Swedish capital.
This potentially means two more frontpage stories on slashdot and 3 if the Economics award goes to behavioral economics or computational (is there a term like this) economics.
This makes no sense because I can read it on newspapers anyway, no paper is going to miss the nobel awards. And the invention was in 70s and its not like slammer that we must know that NOW before its too late. Sorry for ranting
BTW did slashdot put up stories on fields medals??
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I'd rather see the honour bestowed posthumously
Unfortunately the Nobel prize it not awarded posthumously. This was one of the contributing factors in the whole Rosalind Franklin and DNA issue.
Raymond Damadian has been the "David" in this battle since he first submitted to publish his original images in 1969.... and started to experience the "outsider syndrome". It was Damadian's experiment that led Lauterbur to employ a gradient field and achieve high resolution, using existing methods from Computed Tomography imaging.
Damadian has the patents on use of T1 and T2 relaxation times in MRI. I met him at a small seminar in the early 80's where he was about to abandon his attempts to defend his patents against GE, Seimens, et al. due to costs... he eventually won against all of them. He's at www.fonar.com and a nice summary of the controversy is at www.mult-sclerosis.org .
The gentlemen in question are not "medicinists." Both have backgrounds in the natural sciences, namely Physics and Chemistry.
What is cool is they received their Nobel for medicine, yet neither of their backgrounds are strictly in medicine, or even Biology. Which is why the relatively open and collaborative nature of science, and research in general, is pretty neat !!
Think also of the story of Robert Furchgott. When I first met him, in 1980, he was an emininent pharmacologist who had made important early theoretical and experimental contributions to the field. But he was getting on in years, and many people seemed to think that his major work was behind him. He was working on this obscure problem in pharmacology: he was trying to figure out how acetylcholine relaxes vascular smooth muscle to (dilate blood vessels).
It was an obscure problem because acetylcholine doesn't actually seem to play much of a role physiologically in controlling vascular smooth muscle. But Furchgott had discovered that if he prepared his smooth muscle samples really cleanly, with no endothelium (the "skin" on the inside of the vessel) attached, acetylcholine no longer worked. He figured out that the endothelium had to be releasing somthing, which he named "Endothelium Derived Relaxing Factor," EDRF for short. Evenually he and others identified EDRF as nitric oxide, and for this he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
What makes this particularly cool is that Nobel supposedly established his Prizes because he felt kind of bad about some of the uses to which his great discovery had been put--namely, the stablized form of nitroglycerine known as dynamite. However, nitroglycerine also has a medical use, relieving the pain of angina. Nobody knew how it did this, until Furchgott's discovery opened up the nitric oxide field, and nitroglycerine was recognized to act by releasing nitric oxide (thereby dilating blood vessels in the heart and improving blood flow).
And of course, a few years later, Furchgott's discovery led to the development of Viagra...
I know most of the pulse sequence designers for GE's MRI scanners - trust me, the noises aren't the only strange thing in that department. A bunch of brilliant physicists and computer scientists, to be sure, but uniformly goofy.
That having been said - the physics dictates the sound. You've got three gradient coils around you, for X,Y, and Z, each of which are pulsing in the audio frequencies, so an RF pulse can excite a particular area for imaging.
Originally, the gradient amps for GE's scanners were Techron 8603's, which had an analog input on the front panel. Some interesting (and highly unauthorized) experiments took place involving Dark Side of the Moon and that analog input; an MRI scanner is a very good speaker...and the effect of lying in the tube with that music swirling around is absolutely indescribable.
Are you sure about that? While I cannot find a source for it, I can definitily remember hearing a member of the Nobel Committe stating that they totally disregard any comments in a nomination about the nominee's character, and that they would give the prize to a criminal if he/she had conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. The statues, at least, do not mention anything about the character of the nominees (though, incidentally, the original will says that the prize should be given to the ones who had done the most to benefit mankind in the preceeding year, so they do not appear to be followed too strictly).
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