I don't know who really deserved the Nobel Prize for MRI that was given out in 2003, but I found the WSJ article below interesting.

Atomic nuclei function like tiny planets, complete with spin and magnetic properties. In the 1930s, the physicist Isidor Rabi subjected such nuclei to an external magnetic field and noticed that they align themselves either parallel to it or "anti-parallel." By bathing the nuclei with radio waves, he was able to "flip" their orientation. For his work, he won the Nobel Prize.

Two other scientists, Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch, showed that relaxation time--the time it took nuclei to return to their original state--could be measured in two forms, dubbed T1 and T2. For their discovery of what would be called "nuclear magnetic resonance," or NMR, they won the Nobel Prize, too. NMR was later re-christened "magnetic resonance imaging," or MRI, to avoid the troubling word "nuclear."

Although some scientists had tinkered with trying to obtain a signal from biological samples, it was Dr. Damadian who first conceived of using T1 and T2 measurements to scan the body for cancerous tissue. He patented his discovery and, in 1992, won a patent infringement lawsuit against General Electric for $110.5 million. Today, more than 95% of all MRI scans use T1 or T2 measurements.

,,,

After seeing Dr. Damadian's experiment repeated by a graduate student, Mr. Lauterbur dined at a hamburger joint, where he had a flash of brilliance.

He realized he could subject the nuclei to a second magnetic field that varied in strength in a precise way. Though the idea of a "magnetic field gradient" was not new, Mr. Lauterbur was the first to see how it could be used to reconstruct an image. He wrote his idea in a notebook and had it witnessed the next day. His work, with later contributions from Peter Mansfield, forms the basis for modern MRI imaging.

To return to Eric Rasmusen's weblog, click http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/0.rasmusen.htm.