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Nobel Prize in Medicine Contested
GeoGreg writes "The AP is reporting that Dr. Raymond Damadian is asking the Nobel committee to add him to the list of recipients of this year's prize in medicine. His company claims that he made the key discovery leading to MRI, and that the two recipients (Paul Laterbur and Peter Mansfield) made technological improvements. This link indicates that Damadian showed that magnetic resonance could distinguish between types of tissue, while Laterbur and Mansfield showed that images could be formed using magnetic resonance."
No I deserve the Nobel Prize! I've played with magnets before!
Well, I've got to say that from that summary, it does sound as if he has been overlooked and deserves to be recognised.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
it's ludicrous to think that the nobel committee
would give the award to an avowed creationist.
it really doesn't matter that he invented
the process. to give this man a nobel would
bring the prize into disrepute.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
.... sad.
History is full of examples of people who were overlooked for the Nobel Prize. (Rosalind Franklin, anyone? Heck, Einstein was never recognized with that award for his really major works: special and general relativity.) The prize isn't something people "earn" and it's not something that you're entitled to. It's something that one particular group of people decide to bestow upon you because you've done significant work in their view.
I personally know at least one person fairly well who was overlooked for a Nobel. (This in the view of most of his collegues. Having read the work in question, I tend to agree.) He's very mellow about it, rather praising his friends who did win the prize. To take out ads to bitch makes me suspect that this guy is stuck in the 4-year-old emotional stage. (Or he's greedy and he wants a cut of the $1 million. Either way, pathetic.)
Good thing there is a Nobel Prize to keep scientists researching!
This means he was possibly not nominated at all. If that is the case, then shame on the them. The article says, "He declined to say whether Damadian had been nominated. Names of nominees are kept secret for 50 years." But seeing that he is taking action, one would deduce that he hadn't been nominated or considered (even though he invented MRI, while the other two made improvements (as per the patent)).
A blog like any other.
IIRC, there is historical precedence for this. Nobels are occasionally awarded for improvements or modifications of a theory without recognizing the original work. Nothing to see here except whining.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
What on earth makes you think that a person's religious beliefs have anything at all to do with whether or not they are eligible for the Nobel Prize?
"Oh, I'm sorry, you believe in Thor, so we can't possible give you this honor, but we would have given it to you if you didn't... I don't suppose you could stop believing in him for a couple of weeks, could you?"
--
Man, I can't believe I responded to a Troll.
Personally, I think Nobel Committee has set a pretty dangerous precedent that pretty much punishes researches who have views which deviate from majority's point of view.
Would Nobel Committee award a Nobel prize to a researcher who finds a cure for cancer or AIDS and who is also a holocaust denier or a neo-nazi? NOTE: I'm not putting creationists in the same category... I'm just using an extreme example.
More here: Did Nobel Committee Ignore MRI Creator Because of Creationism?
From the first link: "In an interview Friday, Damadian said that without his work 'MRI wouldn't exist.'"
This is just not so. While Mozart's music would not have been made without Mozart, we're talking about a scientific discovery that's just waiting for somebody to pick up on. You can replace one scientist for another and the advance of human knowledge will continue. It may be slightly faster or slower, require more or less people and/or resources, but it will continue--and I say that as a someone who currently does science for a living. This claim is shameless grandstanding on Damadian's part. It's baseless as well--Lauterbur's first paper on MRI doesn't even site Damadian, and it's unlikely that Lauterbur (and the reviewers for Nature) were unaware of Damadian's paper in Science, especially given the small size of the field at the time. Besides, it isn't up to Damadian or whoever he gets to write to the Nobel committee because it is solely up to that committee who gets the prize. I don't think anyone has ever been added to a prize after the fact anyway.
What does this have to do with Dr. Damadian? The Nobel Prize is not just a prize for accomplishments. Dr. Damadian researched MRI to line his own pockets while the other two researchers simply sought to improve the world. Even if Damadian's work deserved recognition, a person worthy of the award would not run off and sue people for improving the technology.
Damn! I want to be that bullet point some day.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
He's a business person, and in the eyes of intellectuals, this makes him less than worthy.
From http://www.nobel.se/nobel/nobel-foundation/finan-m anag.html
On November 27, 1895, a year before his death, Alfred Nobel signed the famous will which would implement some of the goals to which he had devoted so much of his life. Nobel stipulated in his will that most of his estate, more than SEK 31 million (today approximately SEK 1,500 million) should be converted into a fund and invested in "safe securities."
The income from the investments was to be "distributed annually in the form of prizes to those who during the preceding year have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind."
Read that last part again: greatest benefit on mankind.
It doesn't say the most clever scientist, the most "pure" scientist, or the most religiously skeptical.
This is the guy that took MRI beyond theory and turned it into a machine that saves people's lives everyday.
Yet, the pure theorists get the award and he gets ignored. The decision of the Nobel Foundation is inconsistant with it's own charter.
Once the prize has been given out, the only persons who can alter the recipent list are the recipents, who can deny to recieve the prize. But that's about it.
An NPR story said that even the MRI machines made by his company use the tech invented by the people who won the Nobel, since his ideas were'nt up to the job in the end. Anyway, these creationism apologists always give off aan unpleasant combo of terrorist and car-salesman vibes. Who wants to reward that?
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
...after which this is kind of like asking "Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?"
He did actually invent MRI; Paul Lauterbur made a refinement in imaging technique and Peter Mansfield made improvements to the analysis of the raw data, so the absence of his name is indeed singular. More so because Damadian actually built the first working scanner, holds the patent on MRI (and 39 other patents too), and built the first commercial MRI scanner.
Perhaps even more striking and demonstrating that he was no flash in the pan, Damadian's company (FONAR) currently builds the most advanced MRI scanners available including a full 360-degree scanner with enough room in it for a full medical team (presumably using plastic and ceramic instruments).
So, yeah, you'd have to figure that something underhanded was going on.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Google tells me that this is a myth. Nobel wasn't married. He just wasn't interested enough in Mathematics.
We could just solve this like everything else--whoever has the biggest lawyer wins. /cynic
I also am reminded of an appropraite life's not fair quote from the princess bride
"Life is pain...anything who says otherwise is selling something"
Cthulhu for president!
I did some more looking around the Nobel website while responding to some posts and found this gem in the Statues of the Nobel Foundation:
" 10. No appeals may be made against the decision of a prize-awarding body with regard to the award of a prize.
Proposals received for the award of a prize, and investigations and opinions concerning the award of a prize, may not be divulged. Should divergent opinions have been expressed in connection with the decision of a prize-awarding body concerning the award of a prize, this may not be included in the record or otherwise divulged.
A prize-awarding body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however, be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was made."
So in 50 years Damadian and his supporters might be able to find out exactly what criteria the prize committee used to award the Physiology or Medicine prize to Lauterbur and Mansfield but not to Damadian, but they'll never be able to appeal that decision.
Damadian did build the first MRI table, is still in the business, is still innovating, and as at now builds the best (or at least most impressive) MRI scanner available.
The other germane point is that the two awardees simply refined his invention (and then he turned around in the best GPLish style and refined theirs, and built the first working one), they did not do the original research that made the whole process possible. The beanheads who moderated the sibling comment about Marconi and television down either don't understand that or don't like it. Imaging is just detailed characterisation.
You'll notice that Damadian's not trying to bump the other two dudes off the list, evidently quite happy that they belong there - he's just affronted that the Nobel committee overlooked his contributions.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It seems to me that if Mansfield and Lauterbur deserve a solo (well, duo) Nobel, then a local lad who was recently killed in a light-plane crash (Harry Protoolis of Nautronix) deserves one for his work in sonar, which has carried the field forward as far as M&L's work carried NMR forward.
Not saying that their work was other than excellent, just that it was developmental rather than revolutionary. Radar and sonar had already covered a lot of the ground they needed.
It would also startle me if Damadian hadn't contributed more to their success than a surface reading suggests, since as well as making the original discovery he's been deeply involved in the electronics since then, built the first working MRI table, and currently builds the best that can be had. In other words, his developmental contribution almost certainly exceeds theirs, and he made the key discovery.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Just eyeing off your username now and wonderig why I should take you seriously...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
A great example of it is the fact that the pope John Paul II didn't get the Peace prize this year. His 25-year papacy did a lot for peace, with his strong opposition to dictatorships (like in Cuba or the pre-1989 communist eastern Europe bloc), usually traveling to those places to bring more attention to his views, to the war in Iraq etc. Maybe more important were his apologies for the misdeeds of the Roman church in the past (including the long overdue apology to Galileo) and reapproximations to Jewish and Orthodox churches. Just think of it, this pope went to Israel to pray side by side with them in sinagogues.
But he wouldn't get the prize because of his views on abortion, birth control, priest's celibacy etc, which have little to do with peace but are unpopular among liberals. Not that I support those... actually, I am an atheist, in case you are wondering.
On special relativity:
We do not have to wait until Poincare's 1904 speech at the International Congress of Arts & Siences in St. Louis (USA) to find evidence of his relativity principle. He was working on it since the 1880s. In 1889 he's quoted to have said "we have no direct intuition about the equality of two time intervals." (website of the Nobel Committee )
In "La Science et l'hypothese" (Flammarion, Paris, 1902), we read in chapter VI on "space" (p. 111-112): "1. Il n'y a pas d'espace absolu [...]; 2. Il n'y a pas de temps absolu [...]; 3. Nous n'avons pas [l'intuition directe] de la simultaneite de deux evenements qui se produisent sur des the^atres differents [...]; 4. Enfin notre geometrie euclidienne n'est elle-m^eme qu'une sorte de convention de langage [...]" Here, Poincare states there is no absolute space and time, he discusses the problem of simultaneity and he concludes that Euclidian geometry itself is nothing more than some language convention. There is nothing primitive or in the "old way of thinking" about this! The fourth point, Poincare's conventionalism, has never been popular. It was proven wrong by the general theory, where geometry indeed has implications (gravity!) on physical reality. Perhaps it was his conventionalism which prevented Poincare from getting to the general theory too.
Poincare's book caused at publication in 1902 some fuss among the "Akademie Olympya" that was founded in Bern by Albert Einstein, Maurice (Moritz) Solovine and Konrad Habitch. Together, they read and discussed this book. (ref.: letter from Albert Einstein to Maurice Solovine, published in French as "Lettres a Maurice Solovine", Gauthier-Villars, Paris 1956; or also: J. Stachel, Ed., The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 2, Princeton University Press, (1989), p. 255, Ref. 13). So, we know for sure Einstein was more than aware of the work done by Poincare before he wrote his article in 1905.
In 1904 at St. Louis, Poincare listed the major principles of physics; among them was: "the principle of relativiry, according to which the laws of physical phenomena should be the same, whether for an observer fixed, or for an observer carried along in a uniform movement of translation; so that we have not and could not have any means of discerning whether or not we are carried along in such a motion." (ref: Ralph Baierlein, "Newton to Einstein, the trail of light" Cambridge 1992, p. 187)
In his june 1905 paper "Sur la Dynamique de l'Electron, Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des seances de L'Academie des sciences, 140" (1905), pp. 1504-1508, Poincare wrote for the first time in a complete and correct form the coordinate transformations, which he called "Lorentz transformations": "Le point essentiel, etabli par Lorentz, c'est que les equations du champ electromagnetique ne sont pas alterees par une certaine transformation (que j'appellerai du nom de Lorentz) et qui est de la forme suivante a) x' = kl (x + e t), y' = l y , z' = l z, t' = kl (t + e c) x, y, z sont les coordonnees et t le temps avant la transformation, x', y', z' et t' apres la transformation. D'ailleurs e est une constante qui definit la transformation k = (1 - e 2) -1/2 et l est une fonction quelconque de e On voit que dans cette transformation l'axe des x joue un role particulier, mais on peut evidemment construire une transformation ou ce role serait joue par une droite quelconque passant par l'origine. L'ensemble de toutes ces transformations, joint a l'ensemble de toutes les rotations de l'espace, doit former un groupe, mais, pour qu'il en soit ainsi, il faut que l = 1 ; on est donc conduit a supposer l = 1 et c'est la une consequence que Lorentz avait obtenue par une autre voie." In there is also Poincare's proof that the requirement that Lorentz transformations (including rotations of space) form a group implies l = 1. The essential point here stressed by Poi
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Poincare's "we have no direct intuition about the equality of two time intervals" quote is from 1898, not 1889. But I do know Poincare was working on this since the 1880s, I'm still looking for a correct reference.
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
The English translation of Poincare's "Science & Hypothesis" can be found here.
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.