Slaughtering The Dissonance – Part One

I’ve already bitched about the book ‘The Slaughter Of The Dissidents’ – I’ll dissect some of the more ridiculous claims of  the ‘dissidents’.

Aforementioned ‘dissidents’ are mentioned here. As I don’t own the book, I’ll start (and likely end) with the ones mentioned on the internet.

Let’s start with the alleged ‘inventor of the MRI’, Raymond Damadian:

Raymond Vahan Damadian (born March 16, 1936) is an American practitioner of magnetic resonance imaging. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner." He went on to collaborate with Wilson Greatbach, one early developer of the implantable pacemaker, to develop an MRI-compatible pacemaker. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia gave its recognition of Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership. He was also named Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year". He received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989.

Sounds interesting, no? The entry on his work says:

In a 1971 paper in the journal Science , SUNY Downstate Medical Center professor Damadian reported that tumors and normal tissue can be distinguished in vitro by nuclear magnetic resonance ("NMR"). He suggested that these differences could be used to diagnose cancer, though later research would find that these differences, while real, are too variable for diagnostic purposes. Damadian's initial methods were flawed for practical use, relying on a point-by-point scan of the entire body and using relaxation rates, which turned out to not be an effective indicator of cancerous tissue. Nonetheless, in 1974, he received the first patent in the field of MRI when he patented the concept of NMR for detecting cancer after filing an application in 1972. As the National Science Foundation notes, "The patent included the idea of using NMR to 'scan' the human body to locate cancerous tissue." However, it did not describe a method for generating pictures from such a scan or precisely how such a scan might be done. Raymond Damadian's "Apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue."

In the 1950s, Herman Carr reported  creating a one-dimensional MR image. Prompted by Damadian's report on the potential medical uses of NMR, Paul Lauterbur expanded on Carr's technique and developed a way to generate the first MRI images, in 2D and 3D, using gradients. Peter Mansfield from the University of Nottingham then developed a mathematical technique that would allow scans to take seconds rather than hours and produce clearer images than Lauterbur had. While Lauterbur and Mansfield focused on animals and human limbs, Damadian built the first full-body MRI machine^[7] and produced the first full magnetic resonance imaging ("MRI") scan of the human body, albeit using a "focused field" technique that differs considerably from modern imaging.

In recording the history of MRI, Mattson and Simon (1996) credit Damadian with describing the concept of whole-body NMR scanning, as well as discovering the NMR tissue relaxation differences that made this feasible.

So, has the good professor been recognized at all? Why, yes he has:

Damadian received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. His original MRI full-body scanner was given to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio.

In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner." The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia gave its recognition of Damadian's work on MRI with the Bower Award in Business Leadership. He was also named the Knights of Vartan 2003 "Man of the Year." In September 2003, he was honored with the Innovation Award in Bioscience from The Economist.

Thus far, on the up and up. Here’s where it gets ugly (and preposterous):

On July 3, 1977, the first MRI body exam was performed on a human being (the first human scan was performed by Sir Peter Mansfield's team in Nottingham a year earlier - but this was a cross-sectional image through a finger rather than a body scan).

It took almost five hours to produce one image. The images were, by modern standards, rudimentary. Dr. Raymond Damadian, a physician and scientist, along with colleagues Dr. Larry Minkoff and Dr. Michael Goldsmith, labored tirelessly for seven long years to reach this point. They named their original machine "Indomitable" to capture the spirit of their struggle to do what many said could not be done... but no systems would ever use Damadian's method however. His technique of imaging was never made a practically useable method and has never been used in what is considered MR imaging as we know it today and this is probably why the Nobel prize committee did not feel Damadian and his work deserved inclusion in the prize for physics when it was awarded to Lauterbur and Mansfield for "Inventing Magnetic Resonance Imaging" in 2003. His 1972 patent never described an imaging device but a method of "detecting" cancer... more of a Geiger counter approach for cancer 'detection'. Also, his patent followed on the heels of rumors already floating throughout the scientific community of Lauterbur's proposed idea of using NMR 'in vivo' (still in the human body... an imaging device) rather than Damadian's idea to use NMR as a 'in vitro' (or excised tissue) technique for differentiating cancerous from normal tissue. Damadian has continually argued that was what he meant but the truth is in the details. Damadian may have inspired Lauterbur's idea but Damadian did NOT invent MRI and careful review of Damadian's patent does not support his arguments (even the title of the patent states DETECTING); so, his 'FIRST body MRI' on July 3, 1977 is not actually the first MRI. It was his first attempt at a technique which was un-useable and ultimately abandoned even by him.

After Dr. Damadian's outrageous, numerous public tantrums over his exclusion, a New York Times columnist criticized Damadian's behavior by saying... "there is no Nobel Prize for whining".

None the less his 'machine', which could never be considered an actual MRI, is now in the Smithsonian Institution. As late as 1982, there were but a handful of MRI scanners in the entire United States. Today there are thousands. It is possible to image in seconds what used to take hours but not using any of Damadian's imaging methods of "field focused nuclear magnetic resonance".

So…Damadian was not the inventor of the MRI – contingent on whether one grants inventor status on the idea or the actual non-prototypical device itself. And the fact is, while the aforementioned trio did the pioneering work, the MRI is the result of many other scientists pitching in piecemeal. And from what I can extrapolate, it’s a combination of a few missed swings and a great deal of Damadian’s lack of people skills that denied him his part in the Nobel. Personally I think he should’ve gotten an honorable mention in the very least. However, he’s won a few awards and a great deal of recognition for his work.

To top it off, a quote from the professor:

Damadian himself said, "Before this happened, nobody ever said to me 'They will not give you the Nobel Prize for Medicine because you are a creation scientist.'... If people were actively campaigning against me because of that, I never knew it."

There’s absolutely no proof that this happened, not in the slightest. So I’m going to have to deem this YALTCT (Yet Another Lie The Christians Tell).