A full-page ad in today's New York Times says the Nobel Prize committee "ignored the truth" when it decided to award the 2003 Nobel Prize for medicine to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for discoveries related to MRI. The ad was paid for by Melville, NY-based MRI developer Fonar.
Fonar accuses the Nobel committee of intentionally excluding the researcher who made what the company claims was the breakthrough discovery on which all MRI technology is based: Fonar founder and president Dr. Raymond Damadian.
Lauterbur is a professor and director of the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the University of Illinois, College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign. Mansfield is from the University of Nottingham in the U.K. They are expected to receive the award in Stockholm on December 10.
Fonar's views have found support among prominent members of the scientific community, including Dr. Eugene Feigelson, senior vice president for biomedical education and research and dean of the State University of New York College of Medicine, whose comments appear in the ad.
"MRI's entire development rests on the shoulders of Damadian's discovery of NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) proton relaxation differences among normal and diseased tissues, and his proposal of external scanning of NMR relaxation differences in the human body, published in Science in 1971," Feigelson wrote in a letter that appeared in the ad.
The Nobel Prize committee declined to comment on its selection of candidates. Fonar spokesman Daniel Culver told AuntMinnie.com that Damadian's omission has hurt the company, and is particularly egregious considering that the Nobel committee could have easily nominated all three candidates for the prize. The company plans to continue the media blitz with full-page ads in the Washington Post, and expanded information on its Web site.
"People have been calling all day offering to pay for the ads," said David Terry of Fonar.
By AuntMinnie.com staff writersOctober 10, 2003
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Nobel medicine prize winner thought it was joke, October 10, 2003
MRI idea seized Nobel winner for quarter century, October 6, 2003
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