|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Its Hard Being an Innovator: RAYMOND DAMADIAN NY Times: December 14, 2003
Initially, I was overwhelmed. It was just beyond my comprehension that having started it all I got left out. What do you think it means to be the author of an idea? It depends on its potency, but I can tell you that the pain and torment scales directly with the magnitude of the idea. What long-suffering innovators come to mind? They all suffered. Newton was subjected to a lot of harassment and got progressively more cloistered, and Semmelweis died in a mental institution. It's a clich to say creative people are stressed. It's an issue of cause and effect. It's hard to understand what a person's going through unless you've been in the center of it. People call you mad -- it's tough stuff to go through. Have people called you mad? Crazy, they called me. I made presentations on this incongruous idea that you could stuff a human being into the magnet. Sure enough, some acerbic chemist would raise his hand and say, ''How fast do you propose to spin the patient?'' Because it was standard practice to spin the sample. These are the forms of ridicule I had to overcome. Some scientists have said that although you built an early scanner for medical applications, M.R.I. as we know it today rests on Lauterbur's advances in making a discrete image. I would say that's a pack of lies. Airplanes today use Alexander Graham Bell and Glenn Curtiss's invention of the aileron. When you look out the window of a plane, you see the ailerons going up and down. The Wright brothers had a very primitive technique for controlling flight. Yet that doesn't discredit the Wright brothers, because they did it first. Your ads mention politics as one reason the Nobel committee excluded you. What are the political reasons to your mind? Ten or 15 years ago, I read in a scientific report that 60 percent of new great discoveries were made by an outsider to the field within the first year he was in the field. Which was true in my case. So there was an inclination among experts to close ranks and essentially say: ''We'll take it from here. Thanks for the insight, but now, please go away.'' |
|
Disclaimer Notice:-Information on this web
site is provided for informational purposes only. |
In 1977, you made the first human body scan with magnetic resonance imaging, and the Supreme Court considers you its patent holder. Yet this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their discoveries in M.R.I. Why?