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Biotech Science

Nobel Prize for Medicine For MRI 163

Posted by Hemos from the respect! dept.
andy1307 writes "American Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield have won the Nobel prize for medicine for discoveries leading to MRI. Worldwide, more than 60 million investigations with MRI are performed each year, and the technique is ``a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research,'' the Assembly said. The work was done on the 1970s. Lauterbur is at the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Urbana and Mansfield is at the University of Nottingham in Britain. "
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Nobel Prize for Medicine For MRI

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  • Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:49AM (#7144178) Homepage
    Finally! That's good. He had considerable opposition when he was developing the technology. Nuclear magnetic resonance didn't seem a good technology to make into a scanning system. His department chair cut off his funding at one point.

    • Re:Finally! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Faust7 ( 314817 )
      Nuclear magnetic resonance didn't seem a good technology to make into a scanning system.

      I doubt that was it. Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch pioneered NMR spectroscopy back in 1946 -- and they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1952.

      • Re:Finally! (Score:3, Informative)

        by calidoscope ( 312571 )
        The Bloembergen(sp?), Pound and Purcell paper published in 1948 anticipated imaging. The main thrust of the paper was NMR relaxation, which provides much of the contrast in imaging. The paper mentioned that some of the signal effects were localized to specific regions in the sample (the magnet they were using had really rotten homogeneity compared to modern NMR magnets).

    • Re:Finally! (Score:3, Informative)

      by lcde ( 575627 )
      I work researching and designing resonators for Electron Paramagnetic Resonance and the technology that has come from this is quite amazing. At the University of Chicago they are developing a way to image cancer cells using EPR. EPR is very sensitive to oxygen and in cancerous cells there is less flow of oxygen. This allows EPR to pick up dead spots where the cancer is.

      • Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @12:16PM (#7144396) Homepage Journal
        EPR is very sensitive to oxygen and in cancerous cells there is less flow of oxygen.

        While I am a physiologist by training, I am not an oncologist. However, that said, I should probably clarify your statement. Many forms of cancer are rapidly growing cell populations and therefore have high metabolic rates and therefore high oxygen utilization. Technically in these cells there is greater "flux" of oxygen through these cells but as they are imaged, they might appear to have lower levels of oxygen at any one instant due to their high metabolic usage.

        • I'm niether a physiologist nor and oncologist, but as a tumor gets larger doesn't the interior tend to have restricted blood flow and as a result less nutrient/oxygen access and then die off? Perhaps the EPR technique requires a certain minimum size.
    • Don't use the "N" word. It scares people. It's just MRI, got it. ;)

    • Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)

      by VCAGuy ( 660954 ) * on Monday October 06, 2003 @12:20PM (#7144430)
      considerable opposition???

      As the history books record, they were both dismissed as nutcases; when they did the first NMR scan of a brain, they were told that they had fabricated it. It's like Fred Smith of FedEx--his graduate paper on a hub-based air transportation system for packages was given a "C" by his professor (as good as an "F"), yet his idea "took off" (and in a very real way) just a few short years later.

    • I had read several months ago about a cheaper, faster means of conducting MRIs so they could be used more routinely, and by more clinics (meaning those with less funding).

      Anyone else know about info on this?

      • A lot of cool magnetics research came out of star wars (SDI not the movie). To make a MRi you need a very pure high strength magnetic field (ppm). To do some of the whacko star wars space beam gizmoes you need much the same. Star wasa also needed a system they could park in space that used very little power and had zero maintance. The traditional superconducting magnets need frequient refilling of coolents, hard to do in space. So they developed methods for building systems using permenent magnets. Tu
    • Interesting footnote: They decided to call it MRI instead of NMRI because nobody wanted to subject their body to anything with "Nuclear" in the name. People thoght that they would die of radiaton or come out with three heads.
      • The biophysical application of the same technology, however, is still called "NMR spectroscopy". The different naming conventions are actually useful in separating the techniques, which have entirely different purposes.

  • Explanation (Score:5, Informative)

    by Karamchand ( 607798 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:50AM (#7144182)
    For all us laymen who don't know what MRI means: Google Glossary Search [google.com] knows more!
    • Or you could, um, read the article.

      Oh wait, that would just be crazy.

      "Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, has become a routine method for medical diagnosis and treatment. It is used to examine almost all organs without need for surgery, but is especially valuable for detailed examination of the brain and spinal cord."

  • exaggeration (Score:3, Funny)

    by ih8apple ( 607271 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:50AM (#7144187)
    From the article:
    "There are very few people around now that haven't been in an MRI machine these days..."

    Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill and requires the depth of testing of an MRI? (Maybe he's just really old and all his peers have been through MRI's...)

    • Re:exaggeration (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      He had considerable opposition when he was developing the technology. Nuclear magnetic resonance didn't seem a good technology to make into a scanning system. His department chair cut off his funding at one point.

    • Re:exaggeration (Score:3, Informative)

      by BWJones ( 18351 )
      Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill and requires the depth of testing of an MRI? (Maybe he's just really old and all his peers have been through MRI's...)

      Shoot, at one of the companies I am involved with, our MRI get lots of use from young, healthy folks who have injured themselves playing sports, hiking, biking etc.... MRI provides great visual access to bones and joints that previously was impossible without surgery.

      • I don't think the parent was implying that MRIs are only for old or sick people. He was pointing out that while MRI was a breakhthrough in medical technology, it's not quite accurate to say "There are very few people around now that haven't been in an MRI machine these days..." I think it's safe to assume that far fewer than 60 million people undergo an MRI each year. This is likely a case where a few percent of people undergo MRI frequently while the majority of the population have no need.
      • Knees are where MRIs are really, really useful.

        I injured my left knee about seven years ago, and had to have an arthroscopy to have them check everything out. This involves slipping a thin wire-like camera inside the knee and taking a look at the damage inside. The process involved a day in hospital, general anaesthetic, and several weeks of knee soreness before I was able to walk about freely.

        About five years ago, I hurt my OTHER knee. MRI tech was available, so to check things out, I had to lie very sti

    • Re:exaggeration (Score:3, Insightful)

      by duffbeer703 ( 177751 )
      Thanks to the insane lawsuit culture in the US, people get MRI's for just about anything. Complain to a doctor about a heachache, ear pain or something similar and a referral for an MRI will be right behind the amoxicillin prescription.

      • Re:exaggeration (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Complain to a doctor about a heachache, ear pain or something similar and a referral for an MRI will be right behind the amoxicillin prescription.

        I am marketing a new wonder-drug called "Placebocillin". It is just as effective as amoxicillin for treatment of viral infections (which it seems amoxicillin is prescribed most often). Plus it cost next to nothing to manufacture (main ingredient C6H12O6).

      • If MRI wasn't so expensive I'd call this a good thing. Got a problem that seems miner, go through a harmless [1] procedure just in case it detects something serious. Ideally MRI machines would be dirt cheap, and comptuers could analise the system enough to say "Not a problem, Problem, or Potential problem", for most people the results are stored so that if latter there is a need the experts looking at a problem can see what is "normal" for you.

        Because the machines are so expensive, giving someone an MRI

    • > Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill

      The MRI, like the X-ray, is not reserved for very ill people.
    • No kidding. None of my family have been in one. I'd be very surprised if > 50% of randomly choosen people had been in one. This is a far cry from "very few." (FWIW, I live in the U.S.)
    • Does this guy really think that everyone in the world is very ill and requires the depth of testing of an MRI? (Maybe he's just really old and all his peers have been through MRI's...)
      Or maybe he has a better doctor than you do. MRI's are used widely these days, since they provide the only good visualization of soft tissue. For example, if you have any kind of joint injury or pain, you are likely to be sent for an MRI.
      • Better Doctor != Doctor willing to perform expensive procedures at the drop of a hat

        I take two aspirin and skip the doctor.

        • Sometimes it's the opposite problem. My mom (who'd already had knee surgery on one leg) suddenly had the other start hurting like hell. She went to the doctor who refused to do anything but prescribe ibuprofin, despite the fact that she'd been doing that for 2 weeks without improvement and she said that it felt exactly like the other one before it needed surgery.

          Eventually (probably with threats of bodily harm...) she got him to give her an MRI. Sure enough, exact same problem as the other knee and it n
    • Yeah, no kidding. What about all the people in China, India, and Africa? You know, most of the planet?

  • No need to register, here's the text! (Score:4, Informative)

    by scumbucket ( 680352 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:51AM (#7144191)
    American and Briton Win Nobel for Medicine
    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

    STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- American Paul C. Lauterbur and Briton Sir Peter Mansfield won the 2003 Nobel Prize for medicine Monday for discoveries leading to the development of MRI, now relied on by doctors for getting a detailed look into their patients' bodies.

    Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, has become a routine method for medical diagnosis and treatment. It is used to examine almost all organs without need for surgery, but is especially valuable for detailed examination of the brain and spinal cord.

    MRI can reveal whether lower back pain is is due to pressure on a nerve or spinal cord, for example. It can give surgeons a roadmap for operations, revealing the limits of a tumor. And since MRI itself does not require physically entering the body, it can replace some procedures that patients find uncomfortable.

    Worldwide, more than 60 million investigations with MRI are performed each year, and the technique is ``a breakthrough in medical diagnostics and research,'' the Assembly said.

    Monday's prize honors pioneering work done in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for making MRI a useful method, the assembly said.

    Lauterbur, 74, discovered the possibility of creating a two-dimensional picture by producing variations in a magnetic field. He did the work at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, but is now at the Biomedical Magnetic Resonance Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Urbana.

    ``I'm surprised and very gratified,'' Lauterbur said when contacted at his home early Monday. ``In particular, I believe, I think the work has been helpful to many people, and I'm happy that has been acknowledged by the Swedish academy.''

    Mansfield, 69, showed how the signals the body emits during an MRI exam could be rapidly analyzed and transformed into an image. Mansfield also showed how extremely fast imaging could be achievable. This became technically possible within medicine a decade later.

    Mansfield is at the University of Nottingham in Britain.

    ``We've waited a long time, but I must say, I didn't really expect anything like this to come at this point in my life,'' he said. ``My 70th birthday is this week and although I'm retired, I'm still working in research, but I'd given up all hopes and ideas of receiving anything in the way of an accolade of this type.''

    The prize for the two men is ``long overdue,'' said Sir George Radda, an MRI expert from Oxford University. ``These two people have clearly been the inventors of magnetic resonance imaging and developed it.''

    The Medical Research Council, Britain's equivalent to the National Instititutes of Health, funded Mansfield's early work.

    ``They recognized even at the very early physics and engineering stage that this was worth supporting in the long run and it paid off,'' said Radda, former chief executive of the Medical Research Council.

    ``There are a lot of people who along the line contributed, like in all these cases, but they published the key papers.''

    Radda noted that MRI has become very versatile, and can produce images that indicate brain functioning as well as anatomy.

    ``There are very few people around now that haven't been in an MRI machine these days,'' Radda said. ``It turned out to be extremely useful for looking at joints and knees, the brain, the heart -- basically every organ. The difficult one is the lung.''

    Essentially, MRI provokes hydrogen atoms in the body's tissues to emit radio signals, which it then detects and uses to build up three-dimensional images of internal organs.

    The prize includes a check for 10 million kronor, or $1.3 million, and bestows a deeper sense of academic and medical integrity upon the winners.

    There are no set guidelines for deciding who wins. Alfred Nobel, who endowed the awards that bear his name, simply said the winner ``shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or

  • Not to sound superficial or whiny, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:51AM (#7144197) Homepage
    Monday's prize honors pioneering work done in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for making MRI a useful method, the assembly said.

    Heck, the first whole-body MRI scanner was finished in 1977 -- and the Nobel Prize is being awarded just now? What am I missing on how long it takes for the committee to conclude that something has been revolutionary? I realize that Nobel Prizes must be awarded in hindsight, and that belated high-stature recognition is of course better than none at all, but the time gap still seems a little excessive to me.

    • 'Tis not uncommon (Score:3, Insightful)

      by SiMac ( 409541 )
      Look at the list of previous winners. It's usually a long time before a Nobel prize is awarded.
    • How about this:
      All the other discoveries that merit recognition too.

    • Re:Not to sound superficial or whiny, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Eric Ass Raymond ( 662593 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:56AM (#7144247) Journal
      I realize that Nobel Prizes must be awarded in hindsight

      Well, one of the criterias is that the discovery has benefitted the mankind.

      To my mind, one or two decades is an absolute minimum for such a conclusion. I'd rather see the honour bestowed posthumously - these professors don't do anything with the money they get (at least in the large-scale experimental physics the prize is peanuts compared to the real yearly budgets) and they're too old to really benefit from the fame too.

      • I'd rather see the honour bestowed posthumously

        Unfortunately the Nobel prize it not awarded posthumously. This was one of the contributing factors in the whole Rosalind Franklin and DNA issue.
      • Well, one of the criterias is that the discovery has benefitted the mankind.

        As I pointed out in another post, Bloch and Purcell developed NMR spectroscopy for chemical compounds back in '46, and were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics only six years later. Seriously, how difficult is it to see that the same power of scanning applied to the human body would be beneficial?
        • how difficult is it to see that the same power of scanning applied

          I'd rather wait for the evidence than grant the Nobel price for every promising new technology. The NMR prize was given hastily.

        • Well, if you know much about NMR, you'll realize that it's completely non-intuitive that it could be used to scan *stuff*.

          NMR is best with purified compounds at very low concentrations: add in too many different things or too much, and you'll swamp out all the useful information. Given that, it would seem to be about the worst technology for scanning bodies. Even in retrospect--where many brilliant insights seem trivial--coming up with MRI is still not obvious.
      • I'd rather see the honour bestowed posthumously

        Whoa! A scientist who's worked hard enough to win the Nobel Prize should at the very least live to see it, and enjoy the peer acclaim of having gotten one, if not for the monetary commendation.

        And yes, if they've done enough to contribute so much to society, you cannot spare a few hundred thousand dollars to them just because they're old?

        Remember, age is not a deterrent to feel accomplished -- and this is something that should not be taken away. They deser
        • A scientist who's worked hard enough to win the Nobel Prize should at the very least live to see it...
          Any scientist who's worked hard enough to win wasn't attempting to win anything.

          The unrestricted 'grant' money is quite nice, though.

        • I agree. Age should not be a deterrent - my being young for an accomplished postdoc you don't have to tell me that.

          However, to be brutally honest, peer acclaim is objectively good for only one thing: securing more funding. You get acclaim, no-one can dismiss your proposals.

          Peer acclaim is (50 - x)% fake politeness and ass-kissing mixed with a x% chance of getting backstabbed if you ever foul-up - and x is growing with every successful proposal.

    • Nobel has always been that way (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bluGill ( 862 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @12:01PM (#7144299)

      The Nobel prize has traditionally been very slow to make awards. They are based not on scientifi merit, but significant scientifi merit. The committe has been burned a few times in the past when the awarded a prize for something that seemed revolutionary and worth a prize today, only to have significant flaws develope meaning the work that seemed for revlutionary is insignificant in 20 years. This work may have seemed cool 20 years ago (though other posters dispute that), but it has since shown lasting value to sciencie.

      Remember, Nobel himself was interested in science for the sake of improving people's life. Science for science sake didn't really interest him. (More in the math FAQ on why there isn't a math award) Nobel himself wouldn't have wanted this award given in the '70s just in case it didn't pan out.

      One other point, the committe takes into account personal background. If you deserve an award, but they feel your personaly life would lead you to "wasting" it, they will give the award to someone else. Turn your life around, and you may suddenly get an award at 60 for something you did when you were 25.

      Of course the nobel committies are political. Some awards are given far too soon, and others are ignored for less achivements of "lesser" merit. Overall though, they do a fairly good job.

      • "Of course the nobel committies are political. Some awards are given far too soon, and others are ignored for less achivements of "lesser" merit."

        You mean like how Yasser Arafat got a Nobel Peace Prize, but Mahatma Ghandi didn't?

        • That is one example. I was going to put in some comments about the peace prize becoming a "war prize" once in a while. Eventially I decided it wasn't really on topic, and I didn't want to research such topics to make sure I had details (like the one you gave) incase someone wanted to call troll and demand examples.

          There are other examples of prizes being awarded for political gains, if you want to search them out.

        • I'm not sure, but I beleive that one must be alive to receive it. It could be that had Ghandi lived longer, he would have been awarded the Peace Prize.

      • Nobel, nitroglycerine, and Robert Furchgott (Score:5, Interesting)

        by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @01:02PM (#7144857)
        Turn your life around, and you may suddenly get an award at 60 for something you did when you were 25

        Think also of the story of Robert Furchgott. When I first met him, in 1980, he was an emininent pharmacologist who had made important early theoretical and experimental contributions to the field. But he was getting on in years, and many people seemed to think that his major work was behind him. He was working on this obscure problem in pharmacology: he was trying to figure out how acetylcholine relaxes vascular smooth muscle to (dilate blood vessels).

        It was an obscure problem because acetylcholine doesn't actually seem to play much of a role physiologically in controlling vascular smooth muscle. But Furchgott had discovered that if he prepared his smooth muscle samples really cleanly, with no endothelium (the "skin" on the inside of the vessel) attached, acetylcholine no longer worked. He figured out that the endothelium had to be releasing somthing, which he named "Endothelium Derived Relaxing Factor," EDRF for short. Evenually he and others identified EDRF as nitric oxide, and for this he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

        What makes this particularly cool is that Nobel supposedly established his Prizes because he felt kind of bad about some of the uses to which his great discovery had been put--namely, the stablized form of nitroglycerine known as dynamite. However, nitroglycerine also has a medical use, relieving the pain of angina. Nobody knew how it did this, until Furchgott's discovery opened up the nitric oxide field, and nitroglycerine was recognized to act by releasing nitric oxide (thereby dilating blood vessels in the heart and improving blood flow).

        And of course, a few years later, Furchgott's discovery led to the development of Viagra...

      • I know in class (I am a Chem E. at UIUC) the professer said essentially that he doubted that this award would ever be given to Lauterbur because he wasn't the kind of person who politiced well.

        Looks like he was finally recognized!

        (And more mad props to the chem department of University of Illinois Urbana Champaign!)

      • so? (Score:2)

        by kaisyain ( 15013 )
        According to the will that set up the Prize:

        [it] shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who,

        during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.

        I don't see anything in there saying "in the past 20 or 30 years...make sure you wait so you don't have egg on your face."

        I agree that in the field of science waiting is prudent but I have never understood where the Committee gets the legal backing for doing it the way they do. In my mind the greatest effect i

      • One other point, the committe takes into account personal background. If you deserve an award, but they feel your personaly life would lead you to "wasting" it, they will give the award to someone else.

        Are you sure about that? While I cannot find a source for it, I can definitily remember hearing a member of the Nobel Committe stating that they totally disregard any comments in a nomination about the nominee's character, and that they would give the prize to a criminal if he/she had conferred the greatest

        • Some book I read as a kid "How do they do that?". Unfortunatly that means my memory could be faulty (though I do remember one guy quoted on the subject); things could have changed in how they do things today; that it is something done, but not admitted to; or something else.

          Note that the book is likely either out of print, or has been updated, so you would not only need to find it, but find the version that I read. I no longer have it, so I can't give you any information on which version that might be.

      • It actually varies more than you'd expect. Kary Mullis didn't have to wait too long after PCR was invented, because the technique was immediately useful and revolutionary. Michel/Huber/Diesenhofer won in 1988 for X-ray structure of the photosynthetic reaction center, which they'd published only a few years previously. Until then, people had thought high-res structures of membrane proteins couldn't be determined.

        Scientific research is weird, because what may in retrospect appear to be a "revolutionary" c
    • The Nobel Committee waits for such a long time so that they can be sure that they are awarding the prize for an achievment that is truely legitimate. Consider how embarassing it would be to award a Prize for something that was later proved to be incorrect. Generally, time weeds out bogus "discoveries".

      Something that I always thought interesting was that Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect as opposed to his work in relativity. Relativity was such

      • As a rule the Nobel committee does not award prizes for theories that are hard to test. The quantum mechanists got lots of Nobel prizes because they could instantly explain structures and predict events and constants with great precision. On the other hand GRT was pretty much untestable; there was the Eddington expedition that showed that the Sun mass did bend light rays, but the classical theory predicts that as well, only the amount of bending is different (GRT predicts twice the bending of the classical

    • Monday's prize honors pioneering work done in the 1970s that laid the groundwork for making MRI a useful method, the assembly said.

      Heck, the first whole-body MRI scanner was finished in 1977 -- and the Nobel Prize is being awarded just now? What am I missing on how long it takes for the committee to conclude that something has been revolutionary?

      There's almost always an appreciable delay, even for obviously pioneering stuff. My feeling, though, is that the delay can be longer for breakthroughs tha

    • Heck, the first whole-body MRI scanner was finished in 1977 -- and the Nobel Prize is being awarded just now? What am I missing on how long it takes for the committee to conclude that something has been revolutionary?

      The Nobel Prize committee has made some mistakes in the past, so they tend to be a bit conservative. And in fact, MRI was not immediately acclaimed as the major advance in medical technology that it is now seen to be. In the early days, MRI's were extraordinarily expensive, and there were ma

  • Can you view the pics from the MRI via RMI to UIUC from UoN, UK?

    IDTS....

  • why such a delay? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kin_korn_karn ( 466864 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:52AM (#7144204) Homepage
    Why are the Nobel Prizes always awarded so long after the prize-winning research has taken place? Is it part of the charter to make sure that the advance that's being rewarded is truly beneficial?

    • Re:why such a delay? (Score:5, Informative)

      by kfg ( 145172 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @12:24PM (#7144449)
      Yes, it is. And it often takes some time to determine just how beneficial such work really is.

      As an example how likely do you think Yasser Arafat would be to receive a Nobel for peace today?

      How likely Jimmy Carter NOT to receive one?

      Sometimes you have to wait a fairly long time just to make sure you have identified the proper party.

      I can attest to this with my own family's history. My uncle Albert Schatz invented streptomyicin, and another got awarded the Nobel Prize for it only a few years later. We're so sorry, Uncle Albert.

      This sad state of affairs is now "common" knowledge and had the Acadamy waited 10 years or so to see how things shook out Uncle Albert would have had his Nobel. As it is he now struggles just to get recongnition for what he did, since only those "in the know," know he did it.

      http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,8 23 114,00.html

      They have only rarely caused injustice by prudence. They have jumped the gun and caused injustice on a number of occasions.

      Prudence now seems the wisest course to them.

      KFG
      • Nothing to contend, just to add:- some Nobel prizes have had a much faster turnaround time, so to speak.

        The Nobel Prize for Lit. won by Ernest Hemingway, for instance, was awarded exactly one year after the publication of his book, The Old Man And The Sea.

    • Re:why such a delay? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HardCase ( 14757 )
      Why are the Nobel Prizes always awarded so long after the prize-winning research has taken place? Is it part of the charter to make sure that the advance that's being rewarded is truly beneficial?

      It's so that they know that the advance that is being rewarded is really an advance and not a mistake. For example, up until Michelson's experiments, the prevailing theory was that outer space was not a vacuum, but rather space filled with some sort of aether that allowed electromagnetic radiation to propagate

    • While the other responses to this message about ascertaining the validity of the science before awarding the Nobel Prize are valid, one must also look to the politics of science as well. Just because one is offered the Nobel Prize does not mean one acccepts it blindly; especially if it's offered to two or three scientists that may have had some rivalry between them. Sometimes priciples outweigh the desire for public recognition.

      While I'm not much for gossip, let's just say that there was talk at the BMRL t

  • NUCLEAR Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Score:4, Informative)

    by StandardCell ( 589682 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:53AM (#7144214)
    The reason most of the public knows MRI as MRI, and not NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), is because people would be scared of the term "nuclear" as radiation and would avoid them. In fact, it actually does have everything to do with both nuclei and radiation, but why sit and argue what it really means with Joe and Jane Average? It's a very similar situation to the bad rap that microwave ovens initially had.

    Note: This is not my factoid, I owe this to one of my EE professors who did research in this field.
    • Why is an EE professor wasting his time doing research on marketing semantics?
    • I think you are right, but unfunny. The alternative version is that NMR sounds exactly the same as "Enema", and a patient saying they had come in for an NMR could get quite a surprise.
      • This was a real issue to get the public to accept this technology as a life saver without irrational fear.
        • I don't know, the german word "Kernspintomographie" still has the the nucleus in it, and i've never particularly heard anyone worrying about it...

          Besides, there are enough people around who think that magnets are dangerous, better just not tell them what the acronym stands for. One of our Profs used to say that he was afraid of MRI machines, but mainly because he knew he was surrounded by hundreds of liters of liquid helium and nitrogen, though maybe we shouldn't point this out to the general public either
    • I can't believe this is a problem anymore. When you're sick, you want to get better. Period.

      When you take chemo you take poison and have harmful radiation shot at you. When you take x-rays you have harmfu raditation shot at you. When you go into an NMR they check you out with a big magnet. Woo.

      "I don't wanna go in the scary nuclear machine for my life threatening illness. Atoms scare me."

    • Nucular. It's pronounced NU-CUE-LAR.

      Seriously, don't get me started on the public's irrational fear of all things 'nuclear'. We really ought to cut out some of these damn eco-brainwashing environmental sciences classes in high school and start teaching kids something about risk management. Comparing, for example, the risk posed by millions of gallons of gasoline being trucked around city streets every day, to the dangers associated with nuclear power. Which do you think is the greater risk, and which d
    • The reason most of the public knows MRI as MRI, and not NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), is because people would be scared of the term "nuclear" ... It's a very similar situation to the bad rap that microwave ovens initially had.

      Then again, not too many people put their entire body in a microwave oven and have someone outside press "start".

    • The reason most of the public knows MRI as MRI, and not NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), is because people would be scared of the term "nuclear" as radiation and would avoid them.

      True, as far as I know. Certainly the technology was always called NMR back when I got my degree in physical chemistry in the early 1970s. (I actually wrote one of my final-year papers on the analysis of NMR data for a new compound my adviser had synthesized.)

  • Official press trelease (Score:4, Informative)

    by oll ( 78871 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:54AM (#7144226)
    The official press release [nobel.se]from The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet.
  • This gives hope for us physicists who work on methods and experiments that seem to have no practical use at the time. Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell won the 1953 physics nobel prize for developing the technique of NMR.

  • MRI is wonderful. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cgranade ( 702534 ) <cgranade@gma i l . c om> on Monday October 06, 2003 @11:56AM (#7144249) Homepage Journal
    Now, thanks to MRI, we get to see pictures [bmj.com] of very interesting things [improbable.com] such as sex in an MRI tube...
  • Hey, I studied with Lauterbur! Actually, I dropped out of one of his classes after 1 week, when I realized I should have taken Linear Algebra first and I was in way over my head.

  • Goliath finally won this battle... Damadian lost? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pohzer ( 561713 ) * on Monday October 06, 2003 @12:08PM (#7144343)
    Raymond Damadian has been the "David" in this battle since he first submitted to publish his original images in 1969.... and started to experience the "outsider syndrome". It was Damadian's experiment that led Lauterbur to employ a gradient field and achieve high resolution, using existing methods from Computed Tomography imaging.

    Damadian has the patents on use of T1 and T2 relaxation times in MRI. I met him at a small seminar in the early 80's where he was about to abandon his attempts to defend his patents against GE, Seimens, et al. due to costs... he eventually won against all of them. He's at www.fonar.com [fonar.com] and a nice summary of the controversy is at www.mult-sclerosis.org [mult-sclerosis.org].
  • I had an MRI a couple of years ago, and one thing I was completely unprepared for was the humorous, Roadrunner-cartoon-like characteristics of the noises it makes. They did several sequences, and each had its own funny noise. Ba-doink, ba-doink, ba-doink... Frawnk, frawnk, frawnk... Galeep, galeep, galeep.

    I even went online to read some technical explanations, but nothing explained why these noises have the humorous characteristics that they have.
    • The noises you hear during an MRI scan are the gradient coils switching on and off. They differ from sequence to sequence and the prescription for a particular scan. I guess funny depends on your sense of humor :). There haven been people that have made MRI sequences that can actually play arbitrary sound waveforms through these noises that the gradients make so that the scanner could "say" different instructions to the patient. I don't know if they sampled some jokes so that the gradients could really soun

    • The original gradient amps were audio gear (Score:5, Interesting)

      by djh101010 ( 656795 ) on Monday October 06, 2003 @01:53PM (#7145336) Homepage Journal
      I know most of the pulse sequence designers for GE's MRI scanners - trust me, the noises aren't the only strange thing in that department. A bunch of brilliant physicists and computer scientists, to be sure, but uniformly goofy.

      That having been said - the physics dictates the sound. You've got three gradient coils around you, for X,Y, and Z, each of which are pulsing in the audio frequencies, so an RF pulse can excite a particular area for imaging.

      Originally, the gradient amps for GE's scanners were Techron 8603's, which had an analog input on the front panel. Some interesting (and highly unauthorized) experiments took place involving Dark Side of the Moon and that analog input; an MRI scanner is a very good speaker...and the effect of lying in the tube with that music swirling around is absolutely indescribable.
    • The sounds that one hears when having an MRI can best be likened to being inside a giant floppy drive.

  • Go MRI! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Now if someone could figure out a way to make an MRI cost less than $5,000 per scan, I'd award them the Nobel Prize in a hearbeat!
  • Pioneering research into anti-claustrophobia treatments?

  • MRIs are fun (Score:3, Informative)

    by mr100percent ( 57156 ) * on Monday October 06, 2003 @12:58PM (#7144813) Homepage Journal
    I've had some fun with MRIs too. After I got a head scan with a closed MRI, the tech picked up a screwdriver and gave it to me. I walked over to the machine, and felt a very strong force begin to tug and tug on the screwdriver. Waving it in the tunnel, it almost latched onto the ceiling. Luckily the machine was turned off, and the outside had some shielding, or I imagine would have been dragged accross the room.

    The MRI technology was developed at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, right by where I live. The first machine over here was built with permanent magnets, dozens of them in metal brick form stacked to form the plates. The lab was situated right above the parking garage, which was unlucky for the cars below. People began to notice that all the cars parked in a certain corner wouldn't start if they were left there for a while. It turns out the machine wasn't shielded enough, and the magnetism was somehow draining all the car batteries below. The floor, as well as the walls, soon got lead or copper shielding after that. Can anyone explain to me why that happened?

    Another interesting story there: One day, the custodian somehow ignored the red "In Progress" signs and entered while using the floor buffing machine. Immediately the machine was yanked off the ground, and dragged into the tunnel, where I imagine a patient was lying since the machine was on. The patient was OK, just had to crawl out the other side. The custodian was fired, and the radiologists were left with the task of getting a heavy twisted hunk of metal out from in between two permanent magnets. In the end, a tow truck had to use a winch to slowly pull the tangled floor buffer out. Owch.
  • That reminds me, I need to go to class. Damn you Slashdot! Damn you!
  • Wow - a great day for the University of Illinois. Even though the research wasn't done here, it is great that one of the nicest professors (and a professor in the graduate program I am in) was awarded such an honor. Just to chime in with the other facts and tidbits here, note that the other awardee also did a research assistantship/postdoc at U of I in the early 60s :) Must be all that sweet corn
  • I was working on a radio doc about tomography and now these guys are going to be hard to interview.
  • I am so very pleased with the committee's decision. We do MRI in our physics lab, and most of us have some relation to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We are currently working on a new idea of Dr. Lauterbur (who is at UIUC) which should hopefully increase the signal to noise ratio of MRI when performed on very small samples. Translation- we are hoping to do better imaging on a micron to submicron scale of living cells, in addition to doing localized spectroscopy at the same scales. It ju

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