Posted on Thu, Mar. 18, 2004
Franklin Institute to honor scientist snubbed for Nobel
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer
Raymond Damadian, the scientist who was publicly miffed that he didn't win last year's Nobel Prize, is a winner of one of the Franklin Institute's top awards, to be announced today.
Damadian, 67, a pioneer in medical imaging research, made waves in October when he bought ads in three major newspapers to argue that he should have won the 2003 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.
He is among the scientists and innovators to be honored with the prestigious Franklin awards, bestowed over the last 180 years on scientists, engineers and inventors including such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell.
In addition to five Franklin Medals, the institute gives out two special honors called the Bower Awards, one for business and one for science. The awards are tied to a different theme each year - for 2004, it's brain research.
Damadian won the Bower Award for business leadership. It carries no monetary prize. He said he was honored to be recognized by the Franklin Institute and has put the Nobel disappointment behind him.
The Bower Award for science, which includes a cash prize of $250,000, will go to Seymour Benzer of the California Institute of Technology, who laid the foundation for today's understanding of the way genes influence behavior. Benzer's work was chronicled in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Love, Time, Memory by Bucks County author Jonathan Weiner.
Benzer discovered he could use fruit flies to study how the brain works. Small and simple as they appear, fruit flies can record memories and learn. They have elaborate courting behavior and keep time with internal clocks. And fruit flies multiply fast, so multiple generations can be tracked in just a few weeks. Benzer bred flies with abnormalities in their behavior and then isolated the genetic mistakes responsible.
This year's other winners include physicist Robert Meyer of Brandeis University; chemist Harry Gray of Caltech; computer scientist Richard Karp of the University of California, Berkeley; electrical engineer Robert Newnham of Pennsylvania State University; and mechanical engineer Roger Bacon of Amoco and Union Carbide.
All of the medalists will be honored at a ceremony at the Franklin Institute on April 29.
Damadian was recognized for his contribution to the medical use of magnetic resonance imaging, which has proved extremely valuable for detecting tumors, damaged ligaments and cartilage, and other problems with the body's soft tissue. It also has opened up new frontiers in brain research.
During the 1950s, scientists were using what was to become MRI as an analytical tool for chemistry. The technique, then called nuclear magnetic resonance, relied on the way the nuclei of different atoms became excited when subjected to a magnetic field and pulses of radio waves. The time these different nuclei took to "relax" back to their normal states could be used to distinguish one type of atom from another.
In the late 1960s, Damadian thought it might be possible to use nuclear magnetic resonance to distinguish cancerous tumors from healthy tissue. He tested his idea and eventually secured a patent on the technology.
Damadian, a native of Forest Hills, N.Y., started a company named Fonar, which has installed 300 MRI machines around the world. He and his company have prospered; in one recent patent dispute against General Electric, he won $127.8 million.
But there was more to the MRI story. During the 1970s, two other researchers, Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, independently realized that if they varied the magnetic field in space, the molecules in different parts of an internal organ - say, the brain - would respond differently, depending on their positions. These scientists further developed this concept as a way to build up a 3-D picture of the brain or other soft tissue in the body, which is the main use of MRI today.
In 2003, Lauterbur and Mansfield won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for developing MRI as a technique for 3-D images. Some who work in the field have said publicly they agree with the Nobel committee's decision; others side with Damadian, who has suggested he might have been overlooked because of his outspoken view that God created human beings along with the rest of the universe 6,000 years ago, a notion that offends many scientists.
Damadian spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take out full-page ads in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post under the headline: "The Shameful Wrong that Should be Righted." He argued that if he had never been born, there would be no MRI today. |
