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."

Comments

That's just . . . .

[CheshireCatCO]

.... 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.)

Re:That's just . . . .

[crmartin]

You'd have done better to have stopped at the first dot. "That's just." Rosalind Franklin is an excellent example -- someone needs to keep the Nobel Committee's feet to the fire.

In this case, the guy made the seminal discovery, he's on the patents, and he's been associated with it from the start. To be left off the Prize is ... well, questionable at best, and if (as has been suggested) it's because the poor guy became religious, it's despicable.

Re: That's just . . . .

[Black Parrot]

> History is full of examples of people who were overlooked for the Nobel Prize. [...] 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.

Various scientists quoted in the biomedcentral article suggest that the decision may be very legit, even if controversial:

So why did the Nobel committee disagree? Primarily, some leading scientists say, because the approach to scanning first proposed by Damadian was surpassed by a technique using gradients in the magnetic field developed by Lauterbur and Mansfield.

An article from the National Academy of Sciences' Beyond Discovery Web site sums up this argument: "An essential technical advance that opened up the ensuing widespread application of NMR to produce useful images was due to chemist Paul Lauterbur, who was then at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1971, he watched a chemist named Leon Saryan repeat Damadian's experiments with tumors and healthy tissues from rats. Lauterbur concluded that the technique was insufficiently informative for locating and diagnosing tumors and went on to devise a practical way to use NMR to make images," it says.

[...]

What all this illustrates, says another prominent Canadian researcher R. Mark Henkelman, professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, is the difficulty of pinpointing the eureka moment in scientific endeavor.

"This is probably one of the hardest prizes, as making MRI a reality in the medical domain involved many, many people," he told The Scientist. "It's very hard to go back to the beginning and stick your finger on one guy with one bright idea."

Nevertheless, Henkelman thinks the Nobel committee did the right thing. "I think he [Damadian] had a real insight on NMR and cancer and that there might be differences in tissue with pathology that might show up with magnetic resonance, but that's not what this prize is given for, the prize is given for MR imaging and that really belongs to the other two people."

[...]

Richard Ernst, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, takes a philosophical view on the whole thing.

"It's not a very pleasant issue," he told The Scientist. "There are always arguments about who deserved it most. You have to just live with the facts and the reality and accept your fate.

Re:Well

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If he's been overlooked, that's too bad, and maybe the Nobel Committee screwed up. But they're not going to change their minds, and by whining about it, he just makes himself look bitter. He's exactly right -- they are "above the law and accountable to no one." And that means they can give their prize to whomever they damn well choose.

Right now, even though there are other awards that have a higher monetary value, the Nobel is the most prestigious because of its name and history. If they have a few spectacular screwups, maybe that won't be the case any more, and Damadian will be vindicated. But that's history's judgement to make.

he said excluded

[mOoZik]

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)).

Re: Speaking of ludicrous...

[Mattcelt]

They gave one to a guy who's best friend was a figment of his imagination, didn't they?

If Watson & Crick had believed the world sat on the back of a giant turtle, they still discovered DNA, and that's still a Nobel-worthy achievement.

For pete's sake, Alfred Nobel himself believed that if he created a destructive enough weapon, it would end mankind's penchant for war!

Ergo, the Nobel Prize signifies ACHIEVEMENT, not BELIEF.

Re:They've excluded him for his personal beliefs

[lowmagnet]

Believing God created the universe and everything in it is creationism. What Damadian believes is not creationism but creation science. Instead of using science to prove their point, Creation Scientists use religion to fill the gaps with God. That eye is too darned complex, ergo Goddidit.