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| Volume 11, Number 5 | October 17, 2003 |
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Spinks Lecturer wins contested Nobel Prize for MRI workA world-renowned University of Illinois chemist and MRI scientist who delivered the annual Spinks Lecture at the U of S in 1985-86 has won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine - but a contending scientist has cried foul and caused an international uproar over the award.
Dr. Paul Lauterbur, Director of the University of Illinois Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory, co-won this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine with British MRI scientist Sir Peter Mansfield. U of S Chemistry Department Head Ron Steer notes that Lauterbur delivered the Spinks Lecture in the department 18 years ago, and is now the fifth of the speakers since the Spinks Lecture began in 1975-76 to win a Nobel Prize. The others are: John Polanyi, Gerhard Herzberg, Henry Taube and F. Sherwood Rowland. The Nobel committee said it awarded the prize to Lauterbur and Mansfield last week "for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging". But U.S. inventor Dr. Raymond Damadian took out full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post Oct. 10 denounced the Nobel committee for committing "a shameful wrong that must be righted". Damadian spent $200,000 (US) on the ads, saying he should have been included in the award, since he made early discoveries that helped lead to today's MRI process. Damadian is president of Fonar Corporation, which manufactures MRI machines and he holds a basic patent on the MRI technique, which was upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1997. General Electric had to pay Damadian $129 million for patent infringement as a result. An Oct. 11 New York Times story says experts believe that while Damadian made some initial discoveries that led in the direction of MRI use, it was Lauterbur and others who refined the idea. "Damadian's idea was to look at nuclear magnetic resonance signals from excised lumps of tissue to see if they were cancerous. But it was Lauterbur ... who showed how to use the signal to generate an image of the body," one expert states.
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