THE pain of emotional rejection is played out in the brain as though it is genuine physical suffering, claimed a study from California last week (see 鈥淩ejection really does hurt鈥�). One person for whom this won鈥檛 have been news is Raymond Damadian, the American scientist and business executive who says he has been robbed of a share of this year鈥檚 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.
In case you hadn鈥檛 heard, the prize was awarded to Paul Lauterbur of the University of Illinois and Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham for their contributions to developing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. But Damadian insists that without his earlier work their breakthroughs would not have been possible. And he isn鈥檛 about to retire meekly into the shadows.
Following last week鈥檚 announcement, his company took out a full-page advert in The Washington Post headlined 鈥淭he shameful wrong that must be righted鈥�. The advert asks the Nobel committee to recant, and provides a clip-out form for the public to petition them.
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It is tempting to dismiss this as the work of an obsessive with more money than PR sense. What makes it worth pausing for serious thought is that Damadian most definitely was one of the pioneers of MRI. In 1971, he published a ground-breaking paper in Science showing that cancer cells and normal cells emit different magnetic resonance signals. The National Museum of American History in Washington DC owns an early scanning machine called, appropriately enough, Indomitable, which Damadian developed in 1977. A year later he founded a company that continues to this day to manufacture MRI scanners.
So did the Nobel committee get it wrong? The dispute over who invented MRI goes back years, and scientists in the field seem genuinely split. Damadian鈥檚 1971 Science paper certainly helped raise awareness of the enormous medical potential of magnetic resonance signals. But it never led to a clinically useful cancer diagnosis. And despite Damadian鈥檚 early scanner, it was the exploitation of magnetic field gradients and clever signal processing techniques by Lauterbur and Mansfield that made possible MRI as we know it.
In other words, while the Nobel committee might have included Damadian, the history is open to sufficient interpretation to give them a defence for leaving him out. As with previous controversial Nobel decisions, the collective nature of science makes it hard to pin down the invention or discovery to a single 鈥渆ureka act鈥�.
So what now for Damadian? History suggests that Nobel runners-up can pick up prizes against the odds in later years. But newspaper adverts are not the best way to win hearts and minds in Stockholm.
As for that Californian study about emotional pain. The findings came from鈥� you guessed it, MRI.