The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2003

Monique

http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/2003/index.html

"for their discoveries concerning magnetic resonance imaging"

Paul C. Lauterbur - University of Illinois
Sir Peter Mansfield - University of Nottingham

Mentat

So, what exactly was their discovery?

Monique

I haven't read it all yet, but it is all in here:

http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/2003/press.html

Mentat

So, I guess they were the ones responsible for the MRI. Hasn't that been around for a long time? I don't know, but I think they should have gotten recognition long ago. But then, I don't know how long it's been around (I didn't read the whole article either). Heck, any amount of time that people usually call "recent" seems like a long time to me anyway [g)].

PrudensOptimus

wow 2 nobel prizes, impressive. Let me read.

adrenaline

It took a long time because of a controversy about another scientist that probably should have also been a corecipient...Raymond Damadian He was shafted! Whoever thinks science isn't rife with politics is wrong.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20031008/06/

selfAdjoint

According to the opinion of a lot of experts who know the field, he wasn't shafted; his early work on NMR was good, but it didn't contribute to MRI, which is what the prize was given for. His highly publicised and richly funded sour grapes campaign is a disgrace.

Mentat

That's terrible. I read somewhere that Chien-Shiung Wu was also denied her fair share of the Nobel award given to Lee and Yang for the discovery of parity violation. Of course, in her case, it is usually blamed on bias against her gender.

This has probably happened lots of times before. So you are right, adrenaline, science is rife with politics.

adrenaline

Not to mention Rosalind Franklin who probably should have been given the Nobel prize (posthumously I guess) along with Watson and Crick. The list goes on and on. Yes, dirty politics is everywhere.

Mike H

From what I understand of the Nobel Prize, they cannot be awarded posthumously except in cases where the recipient dies before the award is officially made in December.

Damadian had a kernel of a good idea, but he didn't develop it. The reason scientists and medical professionals can do magnetic resonance imaging is because of Lauterbur and Mansfield. His contention that he would have eventually developed the gradient methods that Lauterbur and Mansfield did is a moot point - plain and simple fact of the matter is that he didn't develop them. He got beat in that race, and that was the race that mattered in transforming an idea into something which has revolutionized science and medicine.

The Nobel committees are notorious for being either very quick or very slow. For example, Rod MacKinnon (co-recipient with Peter Agre for the chemistry prize this year) had his first ion channel structure published in 1998 as memory serves, and he's still putting them out. That's a pretty good response time (although there have been better ones).

Stingray

Wu's experiment was very simple, and based directly out of Lee and Yang's paper. It was for these reasons that she didn't share the prize.