I posted on this some time ago. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long good article that persuades me that the Prize was properly given just to Professors Lauterbur and Mansfield, and not to Dr. Damadian.
Dr. Damadian was furious that Mr. Lauterbur had cited a study other than
his. He "read sinister motives into the omission, and he became
convinced that Lauterbur was out to steal his discovery," wrote Sonny
Kleinfield in A Machine Called Indomitable (Times Books, 1985), a book
about Dr. Damadian's work.
...
"The prize as far as I know has been given for making imaging feasible,"
says Richard R. Ernst, a professor of physical chemistry at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in
1991 for work on NMR. Dr. Damadian's original contribution, "has nothing
to do with the imaging principle. The imaging principle is not what he
contributed," says Mr. Ernst, who also helped develop MRI in the 1970s.
Of the six footnotes in Mr. Lauterbur's paper, one was on the topic of
NMR and cancer. Rather than citing Dr. Damadian's 1971 paper, however,
Mr. Lauterbur referenced a 1972 Science article showing that an NMR
machine could distinguish cancerous tissue from normal tissue in living
rats. That paper, written by federal researchers, had a footnote on Dr.
Damadian's work.
Another interesting story from the article is on patenting and dumb
university business people:
Soon after Mr. Lauterbur worked out how to create NMR images, he
attempted to establish a claim to his discovery. But he could not build
enough interest at Stony Brook. "The organization that carried out
patenting for my university decided that it could not possibly make
enough money to pay for the cost of filing a patent," he says. "In
retrospect, that seems to have not been the best decision."
Of course, Professor Lauterbur could then have filed for the patent entirely on his own
and gotten 100% of the profits instead of a smaller share. But scientists are not
supposed to be good at business.
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