- Title: VARIOUS: U.S. DOCTOR RAYMOND DAMADIAN DEMANDS NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS SHARE PRIZE
- Date: 22nd October 2003
- Summary: (W8)MELVILLE, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (OCTOBER 20, 2003) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) DAMADIAN SAYING "It's time that somebody spoke up to this cult-house club in Stockholm that lacks entirely the expertise to judge this, that these are the consequences and it is time you hear from the victims. When you ask them how they came to this decision, they say 'we don't explain anything that we do' and what that means is they are accountable to no-one and so my view of it is because it has been so agonal for me is that it is time if they are not accountable to anybody that they should be made accountable to world opinion."
- Embargoed: 6th November 2003 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN/NEW YORK CITY AND MELVILLE, NEW YORK / URBANA, ILLINOIS, UNITED STATES / UNIDENTIFIED LOCATION
- City:
- Country: USA
- Topics: General,Science
- Reuters ID: LVA96VDZ0744VCOD19XU1HRZZDO5
- Story Text: U.S doctor demands Nobel winners share prize,
accusing them and the committee of conspiring against him.
A U.S. doctor is leading a highly unusual campaign
to protest his exclusion from this year's Nobel Prize for
medicine.
New York physician and inventor Raymond Damadian bought
a second full-page advertisement in The New York Times in
10 days to make his case.
In the first he calls his exclusion a "shameful wrong"
and in the second, printed on Monday (October 20), he
quotes the two laureates as earlier crediting him for work
on magnetic resonance imaging for which they won the award
on October 6.
Damadian, 67, owns a patent on magnetic resonance
imaging machines and is president and founder of Fonar
Corporation based in Melville, New York.
From there he told Reuters, "I was excluded from the
Nobel prize, and it is not the Nobel prize that matters,
but because of the Nobel effect, the result will be that I
will my life's work will be written out of history all
together."
In ads in The Washington Post and The New York Times
earlier this month, Damadian said Nobel winners Paul C.
Lauterbur of the University of Illinois and Sir Peter
Mansfield of the University of Nottingham, England, made
technological improvements based on his work.
Monday's ad states "It's time for the two winners to
help right this wrong and insist that Dr. Damadian be
included in this year's Nobel Prize for medicine." The
advertisement cost about $122,000, according to the
newspaper's rates, and was paid for by a group of
Damadian's friends and peers.
The same full-page ad also ran in English in Monday's
edition of Sweden's leading daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter.
"It's time that somebody spoke up to this cult-house
club in Stockholm that lacks entirely the expertise to
judge this" adding that "it is time you hear from the
victims," said Damadian.
Damadian's name appears in numerous scientific
reference books and in countless scientific journal in
relation to the discovery of magnetic resonance imaging.
But he fears that now the two other scientists have been
awarded the prestigious Nobel prize his name will slowly
disappear off the science books and fade into history.
At the heart of Damadian's anger is the bitter
relationship between him and Lauterbur.
Damadian discovered in 1970 that differences between
cancerous tissue and normal tissue could be seen using
nuclear magnetic resonance, a precursor to MRI technology.
He published an article in March 1971, seven months before
a similar article was published by Lauterbur. Damadian
claims Lauterbur's notes credit his work, but the published
article made no reference to his name.
He argues that there was place for three awardees and
the panel had pointedly excluded him, at the request of
Lauterbur.
Explaining how his exclusion is "agony" for him,
Damadian bitterly complained: "He really is directly
responsible because he told the Nobel committee that if I
were included to win the prize, he would refuse it and you
can see the outcome because there were three places for the
Nobel winners and they only gave it to two and didn't use
the third place meaning that they had to go out of their
way to exclude my contribution."
Lauterbur's office at the University of Illinois said
he had "no comment" and that he was out of the country.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in
Stockholm, which picks the medicine winner, said it was
convinced the award was correct. A Nobel Prize cannot be
appealed.
Jealousy and complaints over the annual Nobel winners
are common but public displays of disappointment and
criticism such as Damadian's are not. A Nobel official said
he had never seen anyone take out an advertisement to
protest a decision. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
- Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2015. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
- Usage Terms/Restrictions: None