Dr. Damadian’s research helped revolutionize the field of diagnostic medicine, with MRI scans now widely relied on to diagnose cancer and other conditions.
“We take it for granted now, but MRI is absolutely spectacular,” Burton Drayer, MD, chairman of the radiology department at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, told the Times. “MRI is better at detecting cancers, particularly in the brain and spine.”
In 1971, Dr. Damadian’s findings that nuclear magnetic resonance could be used to distinguish between health and cancerous tissues were published in Science. Three years later, he was granted a patent for an “apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue,” the Times reports. It took a year and a half to build the first MRI that was originally known as a nuclear magnetic resonance scanner, and in 1977, Dr. Damadian and colleagues conducted the first MRI body scan of a human. He then founded a company called Fonar, which produced the first commercial scanner in 1980.
In 2003, two scientists whose research contributed to MRI technology were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, absent Dr. Damadian. He called the exclusion a “shameful wrong” in ads that ran in international newspapers. Still, he has received numerous other awards for his work, including the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Regan in 1977.
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